Munich Workshop on
“Communication Networks in Vertical Industries”

The 2nd MueWoWAS Workshop on “Communication networks in vertical industries” took place on June 17, 2026, in Garching (close to Munich), Germany. The event, hosted by the Siemens Technology Center and organized by Siemens AG, TU Munich, University of Würzburg and Ericsson, and supported by the VDE ITG technical committee KT2, provided the opportunity for industry and academia to exchange on the role of wired and wireless communication networks in vertical industries like factory automation, process automation, transport systems, energy automation, building automation.  The workshop was moderated by Johannes Riedl (Siemens AG). It brought together around 40 participants from 18 organizations.

The report will be published in the ITG News.

Keynote Talks

The program started with five keynote talks to provide different perspectives: Daniel Mai (Siemens AG) provided an overview on communication network requirements for selected industrial use cases clearly explaining the differences to the requirements know from telecommunication use cases. Joachim Sachs (Ericsson) continued with an overview on differentiated connectivity services for enterprises and industries which could be provided soon from a technical perspective but the concrete offerings of which obviously depend on business aspects as well. Nicola Michailow (Rivada Space Networks) has shown his experiences to develop a model for the communication demands of all European wind parks as a case study, while heavily using AI-based tools but avoiding a deep-dive into the specific communication flows to and from wind parks. Dominic Schupke (Airbus) pointed out the importance of 5G/6G/Non-Terrestrial Networks for the aerospace industry and explained from an aerospace perspective the most important technical expectations on 6G and related use cases for them. Finally, Meik Kottkamp (Rohde & Schwarz) explained the relevance of test systems for wireless services and show cased an app-based approach to track and analyse along the own movement path the quality of wireless connectivity. 

Poster and Demo Session

In the second part of the program, the workshop participants had the opportunity to present their posters on their academic and industrial research in the context of the workshop. Nine posters have been presented from seven different organizations. These posters addressed 5G/6G research, deterministic networking based on TSN approaches, energy-efficient communication, network management aspects, Network Digital Twins and more. Extensive discussions happened in the community along all the presented posters.  

Afterwards a demo session has been organized in which all participants had the chance to visit three different demos at the Siemens Technology Center which are the results of selected research activities on Siemens side. These demos focused on Non-Terrestrial Networks and their use in vertical industries, Seamless Failover between (virtual) Programmable Logic Controllers controlling a robot using programmable networks, as well as a novel approach for successfully controlling a robot over a 5G-TSN infrastructure. At all demo locations a lot of interaction and discussions have happened. 

Panel Session

Finally, a panel session with the keynote speakers closed the technical part of the meeting. In this panel the participants deepened on the relevance of requirements from vertical side on 6G, the most important research areas of 6G and the gaps we still see on 5G side. In this panel session also the audience played an active role and asked many questions. 

Conclusions

All in all the event was a full success, highly relevant topics have been addressed and people networks could be substantially extended. The organizers would like to thank all speakers, contributors, and participants for their valuable contributions. 

Dr. Johannes Riedl (Siemens AG)
Prof. Dr. Tobias Hoßfeld  (Universität Würzburg)
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Wolfgang Kellerer (TU München)
Dr.-Ing. Joachim Sachs (Ericsson)