May 06, 2020The Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) and the 5G Alliance for Connected Industries and Automation (5G-ACIA) have recently announced a partnership. Under their agreement, the IIC and 5G-ACIA will align their efforts to enable interoperability, prevent fragmentation and maximize synergies of 5G for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT).
The Industrial Internet Consortium, a membership program focused on transforming business and society by accelerating the growth of the IIoT, is operated by the Object Management Group (OMG). The 5G Alliance for Connected Industries and Automation is a global forum for shaping industrial 5G standards, to help OT and ICT companies, as well as academia and relevant stakeholders, influence 5G development and deployment in line with industrial imperatives. A partner of 3GPP, 5G-ACIA has the formal status of a working party of ZVEI, the German Electrical and Electronic Manufacturers' Association.
Areas of alignment will include use cases and scenarios, requirement modeling and specification, networking best practices and architecture patterns, technology co-existence and interworking, connectivity and communications security. According to the two organizations, joint activities will take place between them regarding leadership in order to ensure a complementary approach and identify synergies.
"5G represents a key technology for the factory of the future and for achieving unprecedented levels of flexibility, versatility and productivity," said Bosch's Andreas Müller, the chairman of 5G-ACIA, in a prepared statement. "We are excited to work more closely together with the IIC and to make sure that the different building blocks coming out of the two organizations seamlessly fit together. Only through such concerted actions will it be possible to unlock the full potential that 5G can bring to the factory floor."
"Networking is a key enabler of the Industrial IoT, and with the emergence of 5G, we have a versatile platform to support many industrial use cases," added Jan Höller, Ericsson's 5G-ACIA IIC liaison officer, in the prepared statement. "We're delighted to work with 5G-ACIA on wireless connectivity to further enable digital transformation across industries."
The agreement with 5G-ACIA is one of several made by the Industrial Internet Consortium's Liaison Working Group. According to the IIC, the working group is intended to serve as a gateway for formal relationships with standards and open-source organizations, consortia, alliances, certification and testing bodies, and government entities and agencies.
