Feasibility Study on Virtual Process Controllers as Basis for Future Industrial Automation Systems

TL;DR

This paper explores the virtualization of process controllers to enhance industrial automation, proposing a novel architecture and a factory scenario testbed to evaluate its industrial applicability and performance.

Contribution

It introduces a new architecture for virtual process controllers tailored for industrial environments and presents a testbed for evaluating its key features in factory scenarios.

Findings

Architecture supports high demands of industrial use cases

Testbed demonstrates feasibility and performance benefits

Enables flexible and efficient manufacturing processes

Abstract

Industry 4.0 offers many possibilities for creating highly efficient and flexible manufacturing. To create such advantages, highly automated and thus digitized processes and systems are required. Here, most technologies known from the office floor are basically suitable for these tasks, but cannot meet the high demands of industrial use cases. Therefore, they cannot replace industrial technologies and devices that have performed well over decades "out of the box". For this reason, many technologies known from the office floor are being investigated and adapted for industrial environments. An important task is the virtualization of process controls, as more and more devices use computation offloading, e.g. due to limited resources. In this paper we extend the work on our novel architecture that enables numerous use cases and meets industrial requirements by virtualizing process controllers. In addition, a testbed based on a factory scenario is proposed to evaluate the most important features of the presented architecture.