Manufacturing machines need to be retooled approximately 15 times per week and in the future even more often because of decreasing batch sizes and increasing short-cyclic demands. Collaborative robots promise to offer a versatile automation approach for priorly manual tasks in small and medium-sized enterprises. However, their configuration needs to change at least as often as the retooling rate because different parts are produced by the machines or might require different handling in general. Therefore, it would be great if robots and autonomous factory systems, in general, would automatically adjust to these changes in an intelligent way. In our approach, we propose a context-aware and location-based approach for agile manufacturing, in which the manufacturing plant parts, especially the collaborative robots, store i) their constellation, ii) their configuration, and iii) their adaptation strategy, and can react to retooling changes and even re-location changes adaptively. For example, moving one collaborative robot to a different location next to the plant will automatically load its new configuration and consult the operator on the adaptation strategy (i. e. the safety requirements). To realize the localization and the network capabilities, we propose to use a multichannel 5G-enabled communication base station and an intelligent asset management strategy.

5G promises to shift Industry 4.0 to the next level by allowing flexible production. However, many communication standards are used throughout a production site, which will stay so in the foreseeable future. Furthermore, localization of assets will be equally valuable in order to get to a higher level of automation. This paper proposes a reference architecture for a convergent localization and communication network for smart manufacturing that combines 5G with other existing technologies and focuses on high-mix, low-volume applications, particularly at small and medium-sized enterprises. The architecture is derived from a set of functional requirements, and we describe different views on this architecture to show how the requirements can be fulfilled. It connects private and public mobile networks with local networking technologies to achieve a flexible setup addressing many industrial use cases.