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This work addresses the impact of best-effort traffic on network-dependent real-time functions in distributed control systems. Motivated by the increased Ethernet use in real-time dependent domains, such as the automation industry, a growth driven by Industry 4.0, interconnectivity desires, and data thirst. Ethernet allows different network-based functions to converge on one physical network infrastructure. In the automation domain, converged networks imply that functions with different criticality and real-time requirements coexist and share the same physical resources. The IEEE 60802 Time-Sensitive Networking profile for Industrial Automation targets the automation industry and addresses Ethernet network determinism on converged networks. However, the profile is still in the draft stage at the time of writing this paper. Meanwhile, Ethernet already provides attributes utilized by network equipment to prioritize time-critical communication. This paper shows that Ethernet Controller filtering with prioritized processing is a prominent solution for preserving real-time guarantees while supporting best-effort traffic. A solution capable of eliminating all best-effort traffic interference in the real-time application is exemplified and evaluated on a VxWorks system.

ARRAY - Automation Region Research Academy

Distributed control systems transform with the Industry 4.0 paradigm shift. A mesh-like, network-centric topologyreplaces the traditional controller-centered architecture, enforcing the interest of cloud-, fog-, and edge-computing, where lightweight container-based virtualization is a cornerstone. Kubernetes is a well-known container management system for container orchestration in cloud computing. It is gaining traction inedge- and fog-computing due to its elasticity and failure recovery properties. Orchestrator failure recovery can complement the manual replacement of a failed controller and, combined with controller redundancy, provide a pseudo-one-out-of-many redundancy. This paper investigates the failure recovery performance obtained from an out-of-the-box Kubernetes installation in a distributed control system scenario. We describe a Kubernetes based virtualized controller architecture and the software needed to setup a bare-metal cluster for control systems. Further, we deploy single and redundant configured containerized controllers based on an OPC UA compatible industry middleware software on the bare-metal cluster. The controllers expose variables with OPCUA PubSub. A script-based daemon introduces node failures, and a verification controller measures the downtime when using Kubernetes with an industry redundancy solution