Singapore’s first 5G Industry 4.0 trial with IBM, IMDA, M1 and Samsung

5G Industry 4.0 trial

IBM, the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA), M1 Limited (M1) and Samsung today announced Singapore’s first 5G Industry 4.0 trial, to demonstrate the transformative impact of 5G for enterprises and drive the next bound of Singapore’s digital economy. This announcement is part of IBM’s edge computing solutions for the 5G era announced at IBM Think 2020.

The trial aims to develop insights and showcase benefits of 5G in Industry 4.0[1]. It will be an innovation model that allows for development, testing and benchmarking of 5G-enabled solutions that can be applied across various industries. 

This partnership consists of the following three main areas:

  • 5G Innovation: The trial aims to design, develop, test and benchmark 5G-enabled industry 4.0 solutions that can be applied across various industries. 
  • 5G Solution Showcase: Solutions developed will be featured at IBM’s Industry 4.0 Studio[2] 5G Solutions Showcase. The showcase will feature Industry 4.0 solutions powered by 5G and leveraging capabilities such as Internet-of-Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence. The aim is to help proliferate 5G solutions to different industry sectors in Singapore. 
  • 5G Solutions Roll-out: IBM and Samsung will evaluate successful solutions developed during the project for possible use in their operations in a broad range of markets and sectors.

5G’s capabilities such as faster data transfer and more-rapid response times, when coupled with other transformative technologies like AI, can enable significant improvements to manufacturing processes. The project will test 5G-enabled use cases for manufacturing, focusing on three main areas:

  • Automated visual inspection using AI for image recognition and video analytics; 
  • Improved equipment monitoring and predictive maintenance using AI-enabled acoustic insights; and 
  • Assembly and debugging using augmented reality to improve productivity and quality

The trial at the Industry 4.0 Studio will commence in Q2, 2020 and will be conducted at IBM Singapore’s Centre of Competency (CoC) for Smart Factory Operating Model for sharing of ideas and best practices. This makes IBM Singapore the ideal location for the trial, and solutions could be ultimately rolled out to other IBM Manufacturing sites, globally.

Successful 5G-enabled Industry 4.0 use-cases developed from this trial could be demonstrated for manufacturing enterprises and applied to production, service, quality control, and testing across a broad range of industries.

[1]   Apart from providing a strong foundation for Industry IoT and automation, 5G would also reduce the cost of processing by shifting the load from the edge device to centralised systems. This reduces the requirement and cost for edge device thus making the application more cost effective.

[2]  The IBM Industry 4.0 Studio will be launched in June and located at Changi Business Park. Interested businesses can contact representatives of IBM, IMDA, M1 and SAMSUNG to visit the studio and view the solutions.

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