# Converging Telco-Grade Solutions 5G and beyond to Support Production in Industry 4.0
## 4 5G Functions and Features to Support the Information Flow within Industry 4.0
### Communication Requirements in MES and ERP Systems  
ERP is an integrated system application that manages and runs all the typical business management software. ERP is a system of systems that conducts all the core processes required to operate a business: accounting, finance, production, HR, supply chain, services, procurement, and others, including performance management for companies. It creates a knowledge base and integrates the data into new tools in a logical way, which gives all cross-business processes a real-time summary. Meanwhile, MES is an information system, responsible for all the data flow in a typical industrial plant, connecting all the complex manufacturing components for monitoring and control. It ensures the effective execution of manufacturing operations to improve productivity and throughput. The goal of MES is to track and gather accurate real-time information of a complete production life-cycle to understand the current condition of a manufacturing plant that helps in making suitable decisions for optimization and to improve the product output. In Table 3, certain types of MES systems and their operational requirements and characteristics are listed. In recent years, Abstract Knowledge-based Automation has been a significant advancement in factory engineering and control science to support real-time decision making in ERP and MES systems. Articles [71; 72; 73] describe the main issues faced by knowledge-based production systems to assist factory engineering and knowledge-based technology management. In contrast to decision support, there are multiple use cases when the latency requirement is less strict; however, the estimated device density is much higher than in the previous case, of data acquisition, data exchange, and visualization. Data acquisition is the sampling process of signals that calculate physical conditions in the real world and transform the resulting samples into digital numerical values that can be tracked by a computer [74; 75; 76]. A volume of MES research was conducted to incorporate ERP and physical operating systems to develop a fully automated and integrated manufacturing management environment [77; 78; 79]. The papers [80; 81] illustrate the requirements and challenges of handling distributed output in a multi-company supply chain and further processes them as characteristics of new IT systems. Figure 6: Industrial Automation Stack with its underlying technologies [70]. In the field of existing MES device weaknesses, benefits, needs and challenges, specifications are gathered from manufacturing companies and combined with insights from literature. MES features include production tracking and control activities in an organization, making available data on the shop floor and evaluating real-time performance metrics such as the usage of equipment, supply of inventory, and quality status [82]. The usage of MES systems is becoming increasingly common in the field of manufacturing; therefore, they also offer interfaces to a wide range of shop floor systems, they also come with data integration, data analysis, and dashboard generation features [83, 84, 85]. The usual restrictions and requirements for MES systems are derived from the typical application types and use-cases. The paper [86] presents a framework to describe the relationship between these aforementioned use-cases such as strategy, structure, and logistics in Industry 4.0 in the sense of a changing world. In the ramp-up process, the complexity of automated production systems results in a number of different priorities that need to be considered. The papers [87, 88] represent the underlying optimization problem, which is multi-dimensional with respect to the preparation and management of production processes. Regarding enterprise production systems, it is worth mentioning that lean production is rapidly being applied by leading manufacturers around the world.