Predictable and Real-Time Message-Based Communication in the Context of Control Technology

The current market trends demand a flexible production technology, but today’s control systems are monolithic and therefore not flexible. The monolithism can be broken by using container-based virtualization and a microservice architecture. In a microservice architecture, messaging is used to achieve independence of services. Furthermore, deterministic real-time communication is necessary due to the control environment. Since messaging emerged from the IT world, real-time capability is not given. Therefore, in this work, a concept for real-time messaging is developed, implemented and validated on a test system.