We explore the challenges and opportunities of shifting industrial control software from dedicated hardware to bare-met al servers or cloud computing platforms using off the shelf technologies. In particular, we demonstrate that executing time-critical applications on cloud platforms is viable based on a series of dedicated latency tests targeting relevant real-time configurations.
Containerizing control applications has been discussed in recent literature. @cite_6 , for instance, presented the concept of containerization of full control applications as a means to decouple the hardware and software life-cycles of an industrial automation system. Due to the performance overhead in hardware virtualization, the authors state that OS-level virtualization is a suitable technique to cope with automation system timing demands. They propose two approaches to migrate a control application into containers on top of a patched real-time Linux-based operating system: A given system is decomposed into subsystems, where a set of sub-units performs a localized computation, which then is actuated through a global decision maker. Devices are defined as a set of processes, where each process is an isolated standalone solution with a shared communication stack. Based on this, systems are divided into specialized modules, allowing a granular development and update strategy. The authors demonstrate the feasibility of real-time applications in conjunction with containerization, even though they express concern on the maturity of the technical solution presented.
@cite_6
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Virtualization is entering the world of real-time embedded systems. Industrial automation systems, in particular, can benefit from what virtualization has to offer: flexible consolidation of applications on different hardware types and scales, extending the life-time of legacy code or decoupling software and hardware lifecycles. However, such systems require a light-weight virtualization technology in order to be able to maintain real-time behavior while dealing with real-time data. This paper sets out to investigate the applicability of container-based OS-level virtualization technology to industrial automation systems. To this end, we provide insights into the capabilities of containers to achieve flexible consolidation and easy migration of industrial automation applications as well as into the container technology readiness with respect to the fundamental requirement of industrial automation systems, namely performing timely control actions based on real-time data. Moreover, we provide an empirical study of the performance overhead introduced by containers based on micro-benchmarks that capture the characteristics of targeted industrial automation applications.