5G-enabled Growth in Vertical Industries

Project Information

5GROWTH

Grant agreement ID: 856709

DOI

10.3030/856709

Project closed

EC signature date 29 May 2019

Start date 1 June 2019

End date 28 February 2022

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies - Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)

Total cost

€ 14 109 226,25

EU contribution

€ 14 109 226,25

Coordinated by

UNIVERSIDAD CARLOS III DE MADRID
Spain

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - 5GROWTH (5G-enabled Growth in Vertical Industries)

Reporting period: 2020-12-01 to 2022-02-28

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

5Growth is a 33-month collaborative project. The main objectives of the project are technical and business validation of 5G technologies through field-trials for vertical industries. Four vertical pilots across Industry 4.0 Transportation, and Energy will be field-trialed on four vertical-owned sites. To conduct the Trials that demonstrate the 5Growth specific vertical use cases, 5Growth makes use of the End-to-End connectivity platforms from to ICT-17-2018 projects: 5G EVE and 5G-VINNI, to perform end-to-end testing and validation of service KPIs and 5G capabilities. To interconnect with both ICT platforms, different integration approaches are explored.

Besides validating the current 5G technologies, another major aim is to develop new technological innovations to enhance the service provisioning and automation process for the verticals with an AI-driven Automated and Sharable 5G End-to-End Solution that will allow these industries to achieve simultaneously their respective key performance targets. Towards this aim, 5Growth is developing a set of innovations by extending the 5G-TRANSFORMER platform, to further enhance the vertical support through (i) enhanced E2E network slicing solutions which enables automated deployment and operation of slices, including 3GPP-defined RAN slices, customized to support individual specific service requirements of various vertical industries, (ii) closed-loop automation and SLA control for vertical services lifecycle management, and (iii) AI-driven end-to-end network solutions to jointly optimize RAN, Transport, Core and Cloud, Edge resources, across multiple technologies, multi-vendors and multi administrative domains (federation).

The objectives of the project are:
• Technical and business validation of 5G technologies in the selected four vertical pilots, following a field-trial-based approach on vertical sites (TRL 6-7).
• To design and implement a platform, and the related components, interfaces and algorithms, to empower verticals to provision 5G connectivity and services directly at the verticals’ sites.
• To develop AI-driven E2E service orchestration solutions to enable automated multi-level, cross-domain, hierarchical service orchestration with multi-domain management of resources with seamless integration at vertical sites with existing platforms.
• Tight integration with ICT-17 facilities for E2E testing and validating 5G capabilities.
• Vertical-oriented trial-based assessment, incl. 5G-PPP KPIs.
• Communication, dissemination, and exploitation (incl. standardization) of 5Growth results.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The work in the project has been divided into 4 Technical Work Packages (WPs).

WP1 focused to techno-economic analysis and business model design and validation. In the first period, WP1 delivered the analysis of business requirements, technical and functional requirements for the four vertical industry pilots (D1.1) and the definition of the different business models as well as methodology for the validation of business benefits of 5G and 5Growth innovations (D1.2). During the second period, WP1 further refined the designed business models and also developed a Service Level Agreements (SLA) model to complement the business analysis (D1.3).

WP2 was in charge of developing the 5G End-to-End Service Platform, enhancing the modules inherited from 5G-TRANSFORMER to cope with the new requirements from the vertical pilot use cases, particularly to enhance service automation with AI/ML, monitoring and interfacing with vertical customers. WP2 provided an initial design of 5G E2E Service Platform in D2.1. A set of selected innovations has been developed and integrated into the 5Growth platform. The two main releases of the software implementation were delivered in D2.2 and D2.3 and the code published on GitHub.

WP3 is the technical WP in charge of the deployment of vertical pilots at four vertical sites integrating with the ICT-17 platforms, namely 5G-VINNI and 5G EVE. It identified missing functionality required to deploy the envisioned pilots in these platforms (D3.1). WP3 specified ICT-17 in-house deployment containing the technical solution for an in-house business validation of the vertical use cases (D3.2). It developed vertical applications and necessary extensions towards the integration and deployment of the pilot over the ICT-17 platforms (D3.3 and D3.4). The final version of the developed platform was published on Github and delivered in D3.5. Finally, WP3 deployed the infrastructure onsite at the vertical facilities (D3.6).

WP4 focused on the validation of the core 5G KPIs, technologies and architectures through verification and validation campaigns in different pilots. WP4 defined a set of Service KPIs and Core 5G KPIs based on existing 5G-PPP KPIs and identified the correlation of the core 5G KPIs with respect to technical service KPIs for each pilot use case according to their desired SLAs (D4.1). A verification methodology and tool design were specified in D4.2 along with the design of a new data engineering platform integrating different data sources. D4.2 reported the initial validation and assessment of the achieved KPIs of each pilot. Two validations campaigns were executed and reported in D4.3 and D4.4.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

5Growth targets innovations around five main components, illustrated in Figure 1: (1) 5Growth Vertical Slicer (5Gr-VS): offering a powerful, yet simple and flexible, portal to verticals; (2) 5Growth Service Orchestrator (5Gr-SO): instantiating and orchestrating network services in a smart and automated manner by applying AI techniques; (3) 5Growth Resource Layer (5Gr-RL): integrating compute, storage and networking resources and providing resource isolation for different slices; (4) 5Growth Vertical-oriented Monitoring System (5Gr-VoMS): providing monitoring across a heterogeneous set of services and technological domains; and (5) 5Growth AI/ML Platform (5Gr-AIMLP): offering services to different 5Growth layers to run AI/ML algorithms. These innovations are combined into the 5Growth platform interacting with 5G EVE and 5G-VINNI platforms, providing E2E solutions across multiple facilities and sites for deploying vertical services for different vertical industries, while taking into account both technical and techno-economic requirements from the stakeholders of the value chain. In this way, 5Growth creates a direct socio-economic impact, through lower cost and higher efficiency for the stakeholders, better service (quality and ubiquitous access) to the end users, and lower bills. The overall society will benefit from 5Growth innovations through easier entry for verticals, more flexibility and cost-efficiency, whilst supporting the services envisioned in 5G and beyond.

The 5Growth innovations will give the industrial companies (large, medium, small) in the consortium and the extended European 5G-PPP community a privileged position and competitive advantage in the European and global markets.

Moreover, in order to ensure wide-reach of 5Growth, the consortium has been very active in dissemination efforts. Specifically, 5Growth has delivered:
• 81 scientific publications (47 journals and 34 international conferences/workshops);
• 21 organized (or co-organized) events (e.g. workshops co-located with renowned events, exploitation workshop);
• 27 demonstrations at flagship academic and industrial events;
• 85 contributions to SDOs submitted, 43 accepted/adopted.

Final design of the 5Growth system architecture