Intelligent Edge Control with Deterministic-IP based Industrial Communication in Process Automation

Abstract

In the past years, the Industry 4.0, also known as the Fourth Industrial Revolution, has emerged by the advancement of manufacturing technologies with the Internet of Things (IoT) to enable interconnected manufacturing machines and systems with higher productivity. One of the interesting scenarios in the context of I4.0 is to provide control from the edge, which will improve the efficiency and flexibility of the system at a reduced cost. The industrial automation, especially the process automation (PA) aims for a converged network for data communication. Traditionally internet protocol (IP) is being used for standard IT communication to connect machines to the enterprise network, but not used as much for field network due to lack of determinism. Recent, research has been focused on the design and development of deterministic IP communication, and some preliminary results have been standardized in the IETF Deterministic Network (DetNet) group. In this paper, we investigate on extending the deterministic IP communication to operational technology (OT) domain to support real time industrial Ethernet (RTE) communications. We have integrated IEC-61131-3 based soft PLC (Programmable Logic Controller) runtime system into an Edge computing gateway. The RTE frames are wrapped up with custom UDP/IP header by a proxy and delivered to the deterministic routers. The routers forward packets with a bounded delay of less than 30us per hop. We validate our approach using an experimental test setup, a virtualized PLC (vPLC) inside the edge device remotely controlling the PA application (bioreactor) by passing through proxies and deterministic routers in a heterogeneous network.