The Value of 5G Connectivity for Maintenance in Manufacturing Industry

Paper in proceedings, 2018

Digitalization is an ongoing revolution within manufacturing industry. 5G technology is expected to play an important role in ensuring connectivity. Digitalized factories set high requirements on technical availability, and therefore also on maintenance performance. However, it is difficult to get top-level decision makers to invest in maintenance, since the effects are usually deferred and difficult to verify up front. For quantifying long term effects, Discrete Event Simulation (DES) is identified as a powerful tool. In this study, DES was combined with established maintenance concepts to provide analysis of a real-world industrial 5G pilot implementation. Maintenance concepts were used to identify relevant inputs and outputs to the simulation model. The model was tested on a use case, where 5G enables support for maintenance tasks. By applying DES and maintenance concepts on more use cases, there is a potential to quantify effects of maintenance and enable digitalized production in a larger scale.