BROWSING: Smart Factory

Rockwell Automation and Microsoft have signed a new five-year deal to combine their expertise in operational and information technology (OT and IT), to deliver new edge-to-cloud IoT solutions that bring connectivity and intelligence for industrial transformation. The deal will focus, in a major way,...

BT and Toshiba have deployed an unhackable six-kilometre length of quantum encrypted fibre optic cable for transfer of highly sensitive data between different industrial facilities. It is the first deployment in the UK of a quantum-secure point-to-point fibre network, for sharing encryption ‘keys’ between...

Swiss Re and Hitachi are offering to insure industrial companies against business disruption from bad or back-firing algorithms in critical AI-controlled processes and operations. It is the first time enterprises have been offered insurance against AI. The arrangement is between the commercial insurance division of...

Digital twin and digital twin drive process improvement within and beyond a factory Digital transformation is a broad term that means many things to many people. But, at its core, digital transformation is a technology-enabled process that facilitates the capture and analysis of operational data,...

The global market for connected edge computing services will grow to about $7 billion in 2025, representing a seven-fold jump over 2019. The lion’s share – as much as two thirds, or $4.6bn – will go to the likes of Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft’s...

Australian satellite communications provider Speedcast International has signed a deal with Nokia to offer the Finnish vendor’s plug-and-play private LTE and 5G solution to remote industrial customers. Speedcast supplies satellite-based networking solutions to the manufacturing, supply chain, mining, utilities, and oil and gas sectors,...

Telenor is to provide global sensor connectivity to plug-and-play micro-brewery and water filtering firm Wayout. The operator’s IoT division, Telenor Connexion, has with Ericsson to bundle its fellow Swede’s IoT Accelerator connectivity management platform into the bargain. Wayout makes micro-factories for local production of craft...

Textile production company Chamatex, in conjunction with sports equipment brand Salomon, are to build a smart shoe factory in France. The site will run automated production of sports shoes, “from start to finish”, the pair said. Siemens will be responsible for sundry IoT and...

Greece has reserved spectrum in low, mid, and high frequency bands for 5G innovation projects, geared towards digital change. It will offer 25 percent of the income (upwards of €90 million) that it raises from the forthcoming national 5G auction back into these research...

Arm has introduced a suite of new safety-critical computing solutions for autonomous systems in the automotive and industrial sectors. The UK-based firm said its new silicon design blueprints are designed for high-powered computing scenarios where safety is a critical factor. In particular, it highlighted...

France-based energy management and automation specialist Schneider Electric has deployed the first private indoor 5G network in the industrial sector in France. The firm has worked with mobile operator Orange and telecoms vendor Nokia. The network utilises “experimental frequencies”. The network has been live at...

Analytics and integration firm Software AG has scored a couple of major industrial IoT wins, it claims, running to seven and eight figures over multi-year subscriptions, and generally reasserted its buoyancy as the enterprise queue for digital-change has been reshuffled in the wake of...

Hitachi has installed a dedicated 5G network at its Silicon Valley Research Center, part of the Hitachi America's research and development division. The installation, done in partnership with Ericsson, will leverage Hitachi’s platform technology to accelerate the development and demonstrate the value of digital...

Wait and hope. That was the message from Huawei this week as it restated its master plan for supremacy of the digital change circuit in the shadow of stretching US sanctions against the firm. The company’s rotating chairman, Guo Ping, told the company’s CONNECT...

Siemens has joined an industrial 5G accelerator programme as part of a collaboration between Ericsson and UK innovation agency Digital Catapult. US data storage company Seagate and UK robotics specialist Tharsus are also on board. The work is geared around private 5G setups; the...

Ten new manufacturing sites have joined the World Economic Forum’s ‘global lighthouse network’ of Industry 4.0 leaders. It takes the total number of smart factories in the network to 54. The new joiners include factories owned by Alibaba, Unilever, Renault, Saudi Aramco, and Schneider...

German pair Bosch and SAP are working to develop a “digital industrial standard” to govern the exchange and usage of company data along the value chain. The partnership holds special promise for the manufacturing industry, and particular for automotive manufacturing, the pair said. It...

Nokia has integrated key industrial IoT capabilities into its as-a-service edge networking solution for on-premise private LTE and 5G. These include high-end machine learning analytics and high-precision BLE-based positioning, plus simpler integration with Microsoft Azure IoT cloud modules and pre-engineered compatibility with core industrial...

The IoT market for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) services will reach $1.09 billion in 2020 and grow to about 10-times the size, to $10.6 billion, by 2026, according to market advisory firm ABI Research. The massive growth of so-called ‘advanced analytics’ within...

The technology and government sectors both love an acronym, but FUDGE-5G? Really? It seems a stretch; a random mnemonic to brand a rather complex-sounding EU innovation initiative. The project’s full name is ‘Fully Disintegrated Private Networks for 5G Verticals; just try picking the letter...

FedEx has introduced a new Bluetooth based asset tracking system in time for anticipated shipping of COVID-19 vaccines, as well as for other emergency pharmaceuticals and medical supplies. Customers in the aerospace and retail sectors will also be able to access location data from...

Deloitte and Wichita State University are building a new 60,000-square foot (5,500 square metre) smart factory showcase facility on Wichita State’s Innovation Campus, already sponsored by Deloitte, to include a full-scale production line, along with a partner space and lab facility. The new facility, dubbed...

Italy-based core network vendor and private network pioneer Athonet has released its open 5G core network on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to enable mobile carriers, radio vendors, and enterprises to deploy and experiment with working private 5G networks just by connecting radio equipment to...

The US government is to invest $1 billion into a dozen new research and development (R&D) institutes to stimulate the economy with homegrown artificial intelligence (AI), quantum information science (QIS), 5G communications, and other emerging technologies. The mission is to drive technological improvements in...