ADS Performance Revisited

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the performance of different integration approaches for the Beckhoff ADS protocol in Industry 4.0, revealing that language bindings and implementation choices significantly impact real-time communication capabilities.

Contribution

It provides a detailed performance comparison of Java-JNA, Java-JNI, and C++ implementations, and explores alternative ADS library usage for improved real-time performance.

Findings

Java-JNA and Java-JNI do not significantly differ in performance.

C++ implementation does not outperform Java solutions.

Profiling indicates ADS execution dominates timing.

Abstract

Real-time measurements are important for in-depth control of manufacturing processes, which, for modern AI methods, need integration with high-level languages. In our last SSP paper we investigated the performance of a Python and a Java-JNA based approach to integrate the Beckhoff ADS protocol for real-time edge communication into an Industry 4.0 platform. There, we have shown that while Java outperforms Python, both solutions do not meet the desired goal of 1-20kHz depending on the task. However, we are are still lacking an explanation for this result as well as an analysis of alternatives. For the first topic, we show in this paper that 1) exchanging Java-JNA with Java-JNI in this setting does not further improve the performance 2) a C++ program realizing the same behavior in a more direct integration does not perform better and 3) profiling shows that the majority of the execution is spend in ADS. For the second topic, we show that alternative uses of the ADS library allow for better performance.