How Industrial Private 5G Enables Digital Transformation

By Gregory Wilcox, Principal Application Engineer, Innovation & Technology, Rockwell Automation

5G was designed from the ground up with enhanced reliability, low latency and a range of spectrum options in mind to meet the demanding requirements of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and industrial automation.

With millimeter wave (mmWave) spectrum and private networks, 5G delivers high capacity and low latency for numerous industrial sensors, actuators and controllers in standard and safety control applications.

5G offers the promise of being a viable technology to augment and even replace traditional wired industrial network connections. This could be a game changer in terms of cost, flexibility, sustainability and time-to-market for industrial operations around the world.

5G and Sustainability

Sustainability policies are growing in importance across all industrial industries. Tethered fixed industrial assets such as skids, machines or equipment require costly wired infrastructure for new installations, and this material usage diminishes sustainability initiatives.

Tethered fixed industrial assets also affect the agility of industrial operations, which slows down quick retooling needed to respond to dynamic market conditions.

Yet, the entire manufacturing industry had to retool industrial operations to meet shifting demand during the global pandemic: switching from soda to sanitizer, clothing to medical masks, or automotive parts to ventilators. The lesson here is that agility, efficiency, resiliency and sustainability in smart manufacturing is a critical national imperative.

In comes Industrial Private 5G, allowing digital transformation to help deliver initiatives such as sustainability and agility by supporting key application that include the following:

• Connected worker applications increase visibility and intelligence through mobile digital tools such as analytics, digital twins and augmented reality (AR).
• Mobile asset applications increase agility and efficiency with autonomous vehicles such as automated guided vehicles (AGVs) and autonomous mobile robots (AMRs).
• Untethered, fixed industrial asset applications improve sustainability by reducing the need for wired infrastructure to connect static equipment, static equipment with rotating parts (slip-ring replacement) and nomadic equipment (operational while static, nonoperational while mobile).

Untethered fixed industrial assets also increase agility by reducing the time to retool industrial operations to respond to changing market conditions.

• Connected worker applications increase visibility and intelligence through mobile digital tools such as analytics, digital twins and augmented reality (AR).
• Mobile asset applications increase agility and efficiency with autonomous vehicles such as automated guided vehicles (AGVs) and autonomous mobile robots (AMRs).
• Untethered, fixed industrial asset applications improve sustainability by reducing the need for wired infrastructure to connect static equipment, static equipment with rotating parts (slip-ring replacement) and nomadic equipment (operational while static, nonoperational while mobile).

Untethered fixed industrial assets also increase agility by reducing the time to retool industrial operations to respond to changing market conditions.

Research About 5G and EtherNet/IP

But can Industrial Private 5G help support these applications in manufacturing and process operations?

To address this question, Rockwell Automation collaborated with network and device providers Ericsson, Qualcomm and Verizon. The research collaboration evaluated Industrial Private 5G technology with ODVA’s EtherNet/IP™, the core industrial communications technology used by Rockwell Automation.

The key learning objective was to verify that EtherNet/IP networks are ready for Industrial Private 5G and that Industrial Private 5G is ready for demanding EtherNet/IP applications.

The illustration on the right is a simplified representation of the testbed developed. It represents an untethered fixed industrial asset application use case, consisting of:

• Rockwell Automation standard and safety control. One area controller with a GuardLogix^® safety controller, and 12 distributed areas with FLEX 5000^® standard and safety I/O, representing skids, machines or equipment. The purpose of the safety controller in each distributed area was to collect testbed telemetry data only.

• Ericsson radio access network (RAN) infrastructure composed of a mmWave base station using 28 GHz (n261) and LTE band 2 using Release 15, and Private 5G core (3GPP Release-15, non-standalone (NSA), on premise).

• Qualcomm MTP, a mobile test platform for data collection and traffic flow analysis, used as an industrial 5G to Ethernet adapter, referred to as user equipment (UE).

• Verizon’s thought leadership. The firm provided an important contribution toward defining requirements, target feature sets and the scope of the testbed, including a roadmap of future validation requirements for industrial network innovation with 5G.

• Tests run according to a well-established test plan provided by Rockwell Automation with strict success criteria of zero faults. It outlined a series of test cases to establish reliable EtherNet/IP standard and safety (CIP Safety™) I/O connections from the GuardLogix area controller on the left (see illustration), with a range of requested packet interval (RPI) settings, over the 5G RAN to the FLEX 5000 standard and safety I/O in areas 1 through 12 on the right. RPI is the rate at which the controller and the I/O exchange data.

The successful test results demonstrated that the current state of Industrial Private 5G (3GPP Release-15, NSA, on-premise mmWave spectrum) has low enough latency and jitter to support RPI settings.

This exceeded the Rockwell Automation default settings for EtherNet/IP standard and safety I/O connections. These RPI settings will support many untethered, fixed industrial asset applications — skids, machines or equipment — that use EtherNet/IP standard and safety I/O communications.

The outcomes of the learning objective emphasized the following: