A rapid control prototyping platform methodology for decentralized automation

Today's industrial requirements regarding the ability of embedded devices used for decentralized automation are increasing. Industrial providers of automation equipment strive to make their products and thus, industrial plants, smarter to raise efficiency. This evolution is based on new technologies like machine learning, predictive maintenance, sensor fusion and advanced process controls. These techniques require performance and energy efficient hardware platforms supporting a fast execution of computational intensive algorithms in compliance with real-time constraints. Therefore, to achieve these targets in a cost-efficient manner, the sharing of hardware resources to implement advanced process controls or machine learning algorithms is beneficial. Further, if different institutions integrating intellectual property (IP) into a single platform a certain degree of isolation is mandatory to protect their IP against theft or manipulation. In this paper, we propose a rapid control prototyping platform supporting the sharing of resources in an isolated manner to evaluate new control or monitoring strategies on a single platform with the help of Linux Containers for process isolation, MQTT for interprocess communication, OPC UA for vertical integration and partial bitstreams.