IBM, the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA), M1 and Samsung are collaborating on 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. It will be an innovation model that allows for development, testing and benchmarking of 5G-enabled solutions that can be applied across various industries.
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 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.
“This collaboration will seed Singapore’s 5G capabilities and strengthen its position as a leading industrial innovation hub, and move us closer in fulfilling our Industry 4.0 vision,” said Martin Chee, managing director of IBM Singapore.
M1 CTO Denis Seek said that through this partnership, they hope to strengthen their in-house engineering capabilities in harnessing state-of-the-art 5G standalone technology for enabling hyper-connectivity, end-to-end network slicing, ultra-low latency, highly reliable and secured communications.
“With the recent award of one of Singapore’s two nationwide 5G licence, we will build a cutting-edge 5G network infrastructure and bring new consumer, enterprise and government use cases to the market as soon as the ecosystem matures, which we are certain will help bring Singapore’s Digital Economy forward.” said Seek.
