Industry 4.0 aims at shaking the current manufacturing landscape by leveraging the adoption of smart industrial equipment with increased connectivity, sensing, and actuation capabilities. By exploring access to real-time production information and advanced remote control features, servitization of manufacturing firms promise novel added value services for industrial operators and customers. On the other hand, industrial networks would face a transformation process in order to support the flexibility expected by the next-generation manufacturing processes and enable inter-factory cooperation. In this scenario, 5G systems can play a key role in enabling Industry 4.0 by extending the network slicing paradigm to specifically support the requirements of industrial use cases over heterogeneous domains. We present a novel 5G-based network slicing framework that aims at accommodating the requirements of Industry 4.0. To interconnect different industrial sites up to the extreme edge, different slices of logical resources can be instantiated on-demand to provide the required end-to-end connectivity and processing features. We validate our proposed framework in three realistic use cases that enabled us to highlight the envisioned benefits for industrial stakeholders.

中文翻译：

---

编排5G网络切片以支持工业互联网并塑造下一代智能工厂

工业4.0旨在通过利用具有增强的连接性，传感和致动功能的智能工业设备，来撼动当前的制造业格局。通过探索对实时生产信息和高级远程控制功能的访问，制造公司的服务业有望为工业运营商和客户提供新颖的增值服务。另一方面，工业网络将面临转型过程，以支持下一代制造过程所期望的灵活性并实现工厂间的合作。在这种情况下，5G系统可以通过扩展网络切片范例以特别支持异构域上工业用例的需求，在实现工业4.0中发挥关键作用。我们提出了一个新颖的基于5G的网络切片框架，旨在满足工业4.0的要求。为了将不同的工业站点互连到最边缘，可以按需实例化逻辑资源的不同部分，以提供所需的端到端连接性和处理功能。我们在三个现实的用例中验证了我们提出的框架，这使我们能够突出显示给工业利益相关者带来的好处。