The pan-European Transport & Logistics (T&L) eco-system is considered one of the main adopters of 5G, and as such, the successful transfer of 5G-empowered services from trials stages to production depends highly on the availability of flexible and intuitive tools and APIs for design, management and orchestration of services. VITAL-5G aims to address the following key challenges for the adoption of 5G in production services by T&L industry verticals:
A. 5G orchestration tools often maintain a network-centric vision, and very specific semantics (network-related)
B. There is a substantial mismatch of backgrounds existing between Telcos and Verticals in: a) where the network services can be deployed and trialed and how the various elements are interconnected; and b) the vertical applications logic often designed to rely on a flat “always-on” IP connectivity among interconnected functional elements
C. A significant number of packages for 5G/NFV experimentation have been produced so far, but most of these elements describe network-only services or apply to small trial experiments.
In this context, VITAL-5G taking into consideration these limitations, will release a flexible platform (Figure 1) adapted to serve the specific needs of the T&L sector focused on the creation, deployment, management and validation of Network Applications (NetApps). VITAL-5G will operate on state-of-the-art experimentation facilities to validate 5G-enabled T&L Vertical solutions and applications in real-life conditions. In particular, three T&L experimentation areas (Port of Antwerp, Galati Port on Danube River, Athens logistics hub) will be used for validation of T&L services developed by consortium partners or 3rd parties, making use of the VITAL-5G experimentation platform and its NetApps open repository.
Three main use cases (Figures 2,3,4) have been selected to showcase the capabilities of the VITAL-5G platform and NetApps for the T&L sector. These use cases will benefit from the associated facility technology upgrades at minimal cost, hence positioned to clearly showcase the added value of 5G connectivity for the T&L sector.
The 3rd party enrolment, will allow to expand the validation of the VITAL-5G platform with closer-to-market NetApp scenarios thus significantly assisting in providing a baseline for a T&L NetApps business ecosystem.
VITAL-5G aims to:
1. Drive and foster the development and sharing of novel vertical-specific and vertical-agnostic NetApps for the T&L sector by supporting open source tools and an open repository for flexible and interoperable deployment through its platform.
2. Deliver an open, virtualized 5G-enabled testing and validation experimentation facility, which will provide the means for relevant T&L stakeholders to deploy and benchmark the performance of their innovative NetApps on top of a 5G network.
3. Demonstrate the benefit and showcase the added value of 5G connectivity for advanced logistics services across European warehouses, sea and river ports, creating a functional value chain for highly automated freight transportation.
4. Provide customized and virtualized access to network and T&L infrastructure resources, enabling dynamic tailor-made service provisioning to 3rd parties (such as SMEs) to validate their applications over resources otherwise unavailable to them, thus boosting confidence prior to actual service deployment.
5. Enable novel business models development for open, integrated and cooperative services across multiple domains, addressing specific T&L use cases and to justify the investment from key stakeholders.
6. Foster the development and advancement of a T&L centered ecosystem, which will drive the European integration of 5G services into the T&L vertical, by bringing together key vertical stakeholders with SMEs developing cutting-edge technology and applications.
