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5G commercial rollouts are in full string, driving industry transformation and bringing new applications. Worldwide governments and industries are gearing up to gain a head start in the 5G era. To accelerate the adoption of 5G in Taiwan, NCU (National Central University) has launched a 5G smart factory project with the support of the Ministry of Science and Technology. Through this plan, NCU will work with Chunghwa Telecom and ORing Industrial Networking to create a 5G smart factory field trial site and develop 5G smart factory solutions. ORing will donate its latest 5G-based IIoT (Industrial IoT) products to NCU to assist the university in conducting this project, in the hope of making a positive contribution to Taiwan’s 5G smart manufacturing.

ORing Industrial Networking, the Department of Mechanical Engineering at NCU, and Chunghwa Telecom will sign a MoU at the Department’s Mechanical Engineering Building on October 1, 2021, asserting their joint commitment to developing 5G smart factory solutions to help Taiwanese industries strengthen their competitive edges and global presence. On this ceremony, ORing will donate its 5G edge gateway, sensor gateway, and PaaS cloud platform powered by Inductive Automation’s Ignition SCADA software. These devices and solutions will be integrated with Chunghwa Telecom’s private 5G networks to facilitate the development of 5G smart factory applications and solutions.

Back in 2015, the Department of Mechanical Engineering has established a smart factory based on Industry 4.0 under the support of Jing-Yang Jou, President of NCU, to develop laser, discharge, and electrochemical machining technologies. The smart factory has integrated a variety of smart technologies including AI, big data analytics, and edge computing. In March 2021, Chunghwa Telecom’s private 5G network was introduced, making it the first 5G smart factory in Taiwan built by a university. The Department integrated its AMR (Autonomous Mobile Robot) with the private 5G network to capitalize the large bandwidth and low latency of 5G to extend the applications of AMR in the smart factory. Besides enabling seamless human-machine collaboration, the AMR also consolidates data from various sensors and transmits it over the 5G network for big data analysis. A smart manufacturing service platform has also been built to help Taiwanese companies develop smart manufacturing technologies. In recent years, NCU has been engaged in the Ministry of Education’s smart manufacturing talent training programs such as the New Engineering Education Program, STEM Program, and female R&D talent development program. By providing systematic online courses on 5G smart factory, the university has played a key role in cultivating smart manufacturing talents in Taiwan.

ORing’s PasS cloud platform offers a robust and easy-to-use management and control platform for all connected devices. Users can have a variety of devices connected such as smart street lights, robotic arms, and touch displays via ORing’s IIoT gateways. The devices can be easily connected to the cloud using standard MQTT or CoAP protocols, allowing users to control these devices remotely. In addition, they can monitor and track a large number of IoT devices easily. As the latest status of the devices will be stored on the cloud, users can keep an eye on the devices at all times even if the devices are disconnected. Data from the connected devices, regardless of the scale of the deployment, can be collected and analyzed. Besides using a rule engine to process data, users can also customize the rules to trigger events automatically, thus creating an intelligent IoT network. Last but not the least, ORing’s PaaS provides several RESTful APIs to streamline the integration of applications.

ORing’s PasS cloud platform is powered by Inductive Automation’s Ignition SCADA software, a US-based company specialized in industrial software that empowers organizations to swiftly turn great ideas into reality by removing all technological and economic obstacles. The company’s key product, Ignition by Inductive Automation, is an industrial application platform with tools for building solutions in human-machine interface (HMI), supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA), manufacturing execution systems (MES), and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). Ignition is used in virtually every industry, in more than 100 countries.

 “Ignition is a strong IIoT platform for smart factories,” said Don Pearson, chief strategy officer for Inductive Automation. “It’s built on open standards, such as SQL, Python, Java, OPC UA, and MQTT. It’s part of an open, diverse IIoT ecosystem that’s vendor-agnostic. And it’s cross-platform, with an open API. Ignition is focused on improving the effectiveness of operations technology. It’s built on open IT and OT standards to easily connect to virtually any PLC, device, or database.”

Cirrus Link Solutions, a strategic partner for Inductive Automation, also donated its modules for this project. Cirrus Link has deep roots in MQTT; its president and CTO, Arlen Nipper, co-invented MQTT. Cirrus Link provides a modular approach to building enterprise-class applications integrated with Ignition. Cirrus Link makes data available to more applications and across enterprises with the highly efficient, open-standard MQTT protocol.

“In the last few years, MQTT has emerged as the dominant message transport for IIoT solutions globally,” said Nipper. “MQTT is positioned to take full advantage of 5G technology. And the primary focus of Inductive Automation and Cirrus Link is to provide tools and technology to enable superior OT infrastructures that are IT-enabled without requiring any special coding. It’s all about providing tools on a platform that factory personnel are using every day, instead of having to write code on an operating system, which requires special IT expertise and is difficult, if not impossible, to scale across the factory.”

To enable seamless upgrade from 4G to 5G networks and provide high-quality services, Chunghwa Telecom’s private 5G network for this project adopts a 5G NR EN-DC architecture to support 5G coverage and DL Aggregation. A 5G N3500 Radio Dot system was built for this project to deliver 5G networks over fiber optic and CAT 6A cables. The private network uses Chunghwa Telecom’s own MEC (Multi-Access Edge Computing) equipment to process data locally, thus reducing data transmission paths and latency while ensuring the security of sensitive data. The ultimate goal of this project is to build 5G smart manufacturing trial sites and solutions to provide customized services for Taiwanese companies while promoting these solutions in domestic and international markets through technology transfer.

For more detail:https://youtu.be/Gz_gOkO0QFQ