Study of 5G Technology and its impacts - Review

Abstract

Digitization is an ongoing revolution in the manufacturing industry. 5G technology is expected to play an important role in providing connectivity. Digitized factories place high demands on technical availability and therefore also on maintenance performance. However, it is difficult to incentivize senior decision makers to invest in maintenance, as impacts are often delayed and difficult to verify upstream. To quantify long-term effects, discrete event simulation (DES) has been identified as a powerful tool. In this study, DES is combined with established maintenance concepts to provide an analysis of real-world industrial 5G pilot deployments.. Maintenance concepts are used to define the relevant inputs and outputs of the simulation model. The model was tested on a use case where 5G helps with maintenance tasks. By applying DES and maintenance concepts to a wider range of use cases, it is possible to quantify the impacts of maintenance and enable larger-scale digitized manufacturing. . Proposed scenarios with 5G-enabled manufacturing were presented based on a real-world digitization project with manufacturing and telecom companies collaborating with the researchers. For this study, the project methodology proposed by Banks (2010) was followed[5]. This model was built with Auto Mod and is based on interviews and tours with observations of the production system This particular case focuses on implementing modern maintenance solutions to achieve the required levels of productivity and availability. This paper proposes that DES be combined with established maintenance concepts to increase validity for decision makers and thus alleviate current problems with the limited prevalence of DES.