5G Test Environment in Karlsruhe: Focus on Networked Industry

With 5G, the fifth generation of mobile communications, the requirements of the industry come to the fore for the first time. Because this new, high-performance mobile communications standard enables demand-oriented networking, even with large data volumes, short reaction times of apps and many smartphones logged on to the network simultaneously. In Karlsruhe, the fifth 5G test environment in Baden-Württemberg is now being created - alongside Stuttgart, Mannheim, Reutlingen and Freudenstadt as part of the joint project "Transferzentrum 5G4KMU".

Small and medium-sized companies can implement and research their own 5G trials in so-called transfer projects in the test environment. The coordinator is the DigiTools competence centre of the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation in Stuttgart (press release of the IPA External Link). The Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Economics, Labour and Housing is funding the project with 900,000 euros. This lays the foundation for a networked production landscape. In this landscape, all machines, plants and tools are networked and constantly exchange data - even between different production halls.

"We want to shed light on the possibilities and limits of the new 5G technology in a productive context. In doing so, we answer questions of predictive maintenance, live evaluation of data by means of machine learning, human-machine interaction, or localization of operating resources as well as augmented reality," says Professor Jürgen Fleischer, head of the wbk Institute of Production Science of the KIT.


mkl, 21.04.2020