Edge Computing-Based Solution and Framework for Software-Defined Industrial Intelligent Control in Industrial Internet of Things

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) enables intelligent interaction and automated collaboration among industrial production factors (i.e., human, machine, thing, method and environment) to improve productivity and intelligent level of factory. The industrial intelligent control system is the basis for realizing IIoT. It can enable industrial production with the abilities of autonomous decision-making and system autonomy. As an extension and expansion of the industrial cloud platform capabilities, edge computing can support industrial intelligent control with low-latency, high-reliability, and high-security edge intelligent services. Combined with the ideas and technologies of edge computing, software definition and Cyber-Physical System (CPS), we propose the solution and framework of software-defined industrial intelligent control (SDIIC) to realize intelligent control based on edge computing from two levels of software and hardware. At the software level, we propose the scheme of industrial intelligent control oriented software-defined edge computing (SDEC) platform to realize the intelligent and flexible management and autonomous coordination of edge devices. At the hardware level, the architecture and key technologies of the software-defined edge controller are proposed. The software-defined virtual controller with differentiated control and computing capabilities is implemented on the general standardized hardware resources. It can support both real-time industrial control and non-real-time edge computing task processing. The SDEC platform and the software-defined edge controller enable the SDIIC solution to realize industrial system autonomy and intelligent control.