Mercedes-Benz and Hyperscalers Drive Advanced Automotive Industry Automation

Mercedes-Benz leverages mobile private networks and 5G to enhance automotive industry automation, ensuring zero-latency communication across its production lines.

Automotive industry players, such as Mercedes-Benz, are initiating advanced factory automation in recent times by using dedicated mobile private networks. The company’s heavily automated production facilities demand zero-latency communication between robotics, human operators, and supply chain logistics platforms. The standard public 5G infrastructure is largely unsuitable for such applications since they involve unpredictable latency spikes. To solve this problem, dedicated mobile private networks (MPNs) provide the isolated and tightly-managed bandwidth that helps coordinate thousands of mobile components in real-time.

Furthermore, operators must design their manufacturing processes based on the available infrastructure to ensure effective automotive factory automation. This, in turn, requires building entirely new skillsets. To avoid collisions and optimize routing, automated guided vehicles (AGVs) produced by car manufacturers require constant communication with a central orchestration system. Mercedes-Benz’s solution to this is to incorporate connected manufacturing into active production. MPN facilitates this by making communications infrastructure work in synergy with operational technology (OT).

Moreover, hyperscalers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure already deploy private edge zones inside their manufacturing zones, building 5G core network software with their existing cloud compute hardware. This proves advantageous for automakers as hardware prices for private 5G base stations drop with new players entering the sector. Also, most enterprise IT teams already understand AWS management consoles, and hyperscalers take advantage of this by offering pre-configured private network kits complete with SIM cards and indoor antennas. This gives IT firms such as Microsoft and Amazon a distinct advantage over legacy telecom operators. Additionally, pairing this solution with edge computing hardware helps in reducing cloud latency while protecting against external threat actors. CIO Bulletin views this contest between telcos and hyperscalers as beneficial for the automotive industry in terms of diversification of choice.