Yokogawa to undertake proof of concept test of 5G, cloud and AI for remote control of plant systems with NTT DOCOMO

Yokogawa Electric Corporation announced the signing of an agreement with NTT DOCOMO Inc. to jointly undertake a proof of concept test (PoC) for the remote control of a plant system by utilizing 5th generation mobile communications (5G), the cloud, AI and other technologies.

The PoC will involve the use of cloud-based Yokogawa AI for plant control and a 5G communication module mounted on a three-tank level control system to remotely control the water level.

This test aims to demonstrate the ease with which companies in the chemical, oil and other process industries will be able to modify their existing systems to make use of cutting-edge 5G autonomous control devices with the latest cloud-based AI. With the goal of achieving autonomous control in plants in the future, Yokogawa will work together with DOCOMO to verify and optimize this technology.

This PoC will examine whether the technical challenge of achieving low latency can be solved by using DOCOMO’s high-speed, large-capacity, low-latency 5G communications network, the DOCOMO Open Innovation Cloud, which offers multi-access edge computing (MEC) to achieve low-latency and meet other such requirements of the 5G era, as well as other cloud technologies.