“The McKinsey Global Institute (MGI’s) Reinventing construction: A route to higher productivity report, released in February 2017, found that the construction industry has an intractable productivity problem. While sectors such as retail and manufacturing have reinvented themselves, construction seems stuck in a time warp. Global labor-productivity growth in construction has averaged only 1 percent a year over the past two decades, compared with growth of 2.8 percent for the total world economy and 3.6 percent in manufacturing (exhibit).”
Construction industry is the largest industry on the global market worth over 11 trillion USD annually. Roughly 7% of the global workforce is working on the construction business. Some 40% of greenhouse gas emissions relate to the construction business. This is a big business, but it is rarely discussed as a potential use case for automation and 5G.
When you think about a construction site it is full of machines and there is a lot of information flowing between humans from the architect to the logistics and workers on the site. This is an optimum place to automate processes and use automatic machinery to perform tasks. This will require a lot of development and testing to ensure all safety and quality aspects. Construction sites are temporary and machines are moving so to automate them you need to use mobile connectivity – perfect match with 5G non-public networks.
Now there is a very interesting development done by Bosch Engineering in Holzkirchen Germany[1]. Bosch Engineering has opened a test site for companies to test out their tools and machineries using 5G connectivity. This is a major step forward in construction automation and is again evidence of non-public networks capability to increase productivity significantly. IoT-NGIN partner Cumucore has delivered the Core to the Bosch Engineering test bed in Holzkirchen. Cumucore installs private 5G SA network for IoT in BOSCH factory including first prototype of 5GLAN and TSN which API has been designed within the IoT-NGIN project.
References
[1] https://www.bosch-presse.de/pressportal/de/en/bosch-engineering-setting-the-course-for-automated-construction-site-with-5g-campus-network-247680.html