Intel, EXOR International, TIM & JMA Wireless spotlight on-premises 5G

June 18, 2021

“We built this smart factory from the ground up to take advantage of the latest 5G and AI technologies."

Intel, EXOR International, TIM and JMA Wireless teamed to build an end-to-end smart factory in Verona, Italy, as an example of the benefits of Industry 4.0 digitalization to manufacturers of all sizes. The factory shows what is possible with the latest networking, cloud and edge-computing technologies in an agile and modular application environment, per the partners.

“We built this smart factory from the ground up to take advantage of the latest 5G and AI technologies from TIM and Intel," said Claudio Ambra, chief technical officer of EXOR International. "Our smart factory in Verona will demonstrate that digitalization can happen at any scale. This is increasingly important for small and mid-size manufacturers who are looking to stay innovative and competitive in the market. We can’t wait to share what is now possible for manufacturers of all sizes with Industry 4.0 solutions.”

“We’re seeing Industry 4.0 adoption accelerating and hearing from customers that they are interested in understanding how 5G and AI can speed up their digital transformation,” said Christine Boles, vice president in the Internet of Things Group and general manager, Industrial Solutions Division at Intel. “EXOR’s new smart factory is a great example of how deploying solutions based upon standards with open architectures can help lower maintenance costs, increase productivity and take advantage of new business opportunities.”

The partners note how the smart factory will include an on-premises 5G lab to demonstrate how manufacturers can build private networks and integrate with existing solutions to deliver business value. The lab will explore 5G’s ability to:

Improve communication in an extreme factory design setup.
Enable peer-to-peer communication through the use of industrial robots.
Impact edge computing cluster connectivity versus wired connections.

EXOR, an industrial PC and human machine interfaces manufacturer, is partnering with local service provider TIM to provide the 5G spectrum (sub 6GHz and 26GHz). This allows EXOR to capitalize on the benefits of Industry 4.0, providing engineers the ability to collaborate, explore, test, deploy and enable digitized technology. EXOR will open a portion of its smart factory floor and 5G laboratory for other companies to prove how they can move to Industry 4.0 with wireless communication.

EXOR will also pilot a visual quality-inspection machine, leveraging Intel Movidius VPU and Intel Distribution of OpenVINO toolkit to automatically flag defects, dust and scratches in near real time. The solution will also classify those defects before sending the information to factory workers for assessment.