ulius Schulz-Zander is a Senior Research Scientist at the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute in Berlin, Germany. He received a Doctoral degree with distinction ”summa cum laude” and Diploma degree in Computer Science from Technische Universität Berlin, Germany, in 2016 and 2011, respectively. He joined the HHI in 2016 as a Senior Research Scientist. Until early 2018, he was a consulting Postdoctoral Researcher in Prof. Anja Feldmann’s Internet Network Architectures (INET) group at TU Berlin. Julius currently leads the Industry 4.0 flagship project ”Industrial Communication for Factories”, which aims at building an ICT Industrial Reference Architecture (iRefA) along with a technology toolkit for the manufacturing industry. Before that, he contributed to and led research projects fucusing on Network Architectures, SDN, NFV, Wireless Access (WiFi, 5G, and mmWave), Data Analytics, and Self Organizing Networks. His research interests are in computer networking, wireless communications, and embedded systems; his work includes virtualization of WiFi networks, virtual network functions and placement, control plane and data plane design, QoS optimizations, middlebox design, networked systems, and multi-access edge computing. During his studies, was a visiting researcher in Prof. Doug Leith’s group at the Hamilton Institute at National University of Ireland Maynooth and a visiting research scholar in Prof. Nick McKeown’s group at Stanford University, USA. During his Ph.D., he was selected to the Software Campus IT executives development program.

Industrial networks face new unique challenges with the advent of smart factories. In this talk, we will present the goal of the Industry 4.0 flagship project ”Industrial Communication for Factories” (IC4F), which aims at building an ICT industrial Reference Architecture (iRefA) along with a technology toolkit for the manufacturing industry. We will present the challenges and opportunities for the design and realization of Industry 4.0 use cases when leveraging the IC4F iRefA and technology toolkit