Towards safe dynamic updates of distributed embedded applications in factory automation

In future production systems the speed of adaptation to changing market needs becomes increasingly important. As automation processes are carried out by flexible, software-defined machines like robots, adaptivity could be achieved largely through software updates. For technical and economic reasons it would be an advantage to update the automation system without stopping production. The challenge is to enable consistent software updates to running distributed embedded applications while keeping the timing requirements of messages and tasks. We describe the kinds of updates to be supported and give a brief first outline of our technical solution for this problem: A real-time container infrastructure that runs embedded components and is able to reconfigure the running distributed application due to a reconfiguration plan to be designed by the plant operator and to be verified by the plant engineering system.