5G as Enabler for Industrie 4.0 Use Cases: Challenges and Concepts

The increasing demand for highly customized products, as well as flexible production lines, can be seen as trigger for the "fourth industrial revolution", referred as "Industrie 4.0". Current systems are usually using wire-line technologies to connect sensors and actuators. To enable a higher flexibility such as moving robots or drones, these connections need to be replaced by wireless technologies. Furthermore, this facilitates the renewal of brownfield deployments to address Industrie 4.0 requirements. This paper presents representative use cases as well as first results, which have been examined in the German TACNET 4.0 project. To analyze these use cases, this paper identifies the main challenges and requirements of communication networks in Industrie 4.0. Finally, we present the applicability of 5G for these use cases.