# Converging Telco-Grade Solutions 5G and beyond to Support Production in Industry 4.0
###### Abstract  
The Industry 4.0 initiative has been showing the way for industrial production to optimize operations based on collecting, processing, and sharing data. There are new requirements on the production floor: flexible but ultra-reliable, low latency wireless communications through interoperable systems can share data. Further challenges of data sharing and storage arise when diverse systems come into play at the Manufacturing Operations Management and Business Planning & Logistics levels. The emerging complex cyber-physical systems of systems need to be engineered with care. Regarding industrial requirements, the telecommunication industry has many similarities to production--including ultra-reliability, high complexity, and having humans \"in-the-loop\". The current paper aims to provide an overview of converging telco-grade solutions that can be successfully applied in the wide sense of industrial production. These toolsets range from model-driven engineering through system interoperability frameworks, 5G- and 6G-supported manufacturing, and the telco-cloud to speech recognition in noisy environments. 202212760025 July 28 July 2022127600025 July 28 July 20221276 practitioners are unwilling to adopt them. Mostly due to the complexity of the implemented system of systems and the cost of unplanned downtime, production engineers share the idea of \"never-touch-a-running-system\" with telco practitioners. In the telco industry, network freeze (i.e., no new updates or changes) is introduced in high revenue-generating periods: usually starting in early December and lasting for a month, so the highly-utilized Christmas's festive period runs smoothly. In contrast, industrial production runs in \"highly critical mode\" most of the time, and any change or update that affects service guarantees are only allowed to be executed within well-planned, predefined maintenance windows. Industry practitioners, however, are willing to embrace ICT technologies as long as they are highly tested, proven, and their complexity is broken down, so the system of systems they operate is still explainable. Besides their application of similar approaches towards complex systems--such as model-driven engineering--, the telecommunications and industrial production sectors now endorse wireless ultra-reliable low latency communications (URLLC) and mass IoT together. The industry-motivated URLLC scenarios are covered by 5G that is provided by the telecommunications sector together with the two other main application areas, massive machine-type communications (mMTC), and enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) [5]. Moreover, the telco-cloud concept further ensures ultra-reliability, low latency, highly dynamic service flexibility, and high security, making sure that end-to-end slicing service guarantees are met. The 6G standardization has just been started, and the requirement-setting is still in an expanding phase. Just to mention a few of the promises, 6G aims to allow ultra-high density of endpoints communication even with terabit per second throughput, tactile internet with real AR/VR capabilities, and ubiquitous connection and services that are available anywhere, anytime. Ergonomic human-machine interfaces continue to be highly important in modern life--including human-robot co-working environments. The most natural command interface for humans is speech itself; hence speech-controlled environments are important alternatives to character--or gesture-based ones in industrial production. The basis of speech-controlled human-machine interfaces is speech recognition itself, a core problem and solution set of telecommunications for decades. The current paper aims to provide an overview of these above-listed approaches and technologies--conceived at least partially in the telecommunications sector--being applied in industrial production.