  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 promises 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, the 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
which 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 which enabled us highlight the envisioned benefits
for industrial stakeholders.
