Virtualisierung prozessnaher Steuerungen in der Prozessautomatisierung

Azarmipour, Mahyar; Epple, Ulrich (Thesis advisor); Kowalewski, Stefan (Thesis advisor); Kleinert, Tobias Theodor (Thesis advisor)

Als Manuskript gedruckt. - Düsseldorf : VDI Verlag GmbH (2022)
Book, Dissertation / PhD Thesis

In: Fortschritt-Berichte VDI. Reihe 8, Mess-, Steuerungs- und Regelungstechnik 1275
Page(s)/Article-Nr.: XI, 111 Seiten : Illustrationen, Diagramme

Dissertation, RWTH Aachen University, 2022

Abstract

Industry 4.0 is a new paradigm that plays a central role in the development of future automation systems. The new generation of industrial automation aims to increase the agility of the automation system. In this context, cooperation with the IT world is an important prerequisite to achieve the requested agility. Therefore, new architectures and solutions have to be developed to realize a cooperation between the automation systems and the IT. The goal of this work is an architecture design for the control devices in order to provide them with a higher level of connectivity and agility. The main features, which are fulfilled by the architecture, are:•The parallel operation of applications of different criticality•The dynamic deployment of new applications at runtime•The realization of a secure gateway for communication between automation level systems and higher level IT systems•The open communication with the IT world•The realization of a local software and access management system. The proposed architecture consists of a multi-level component model and is referred to as acomponent-based architecture for automation systems (KAS). The lowest level of the KAS architecture is the partition level. The KAS architecture employs hypervisor virtualization to enable separation of applications with different requirements on the same hardware. Applications are encapsulated in preconfigured partitions. Containers are used as additional virtualization components to increase modularization of applications. Container technologies enable the encapsulation and management of applications in different containers within a partition. This means, for example, that different versions of the application scan be managed in one partition. The containers are the second component level in the KAS architecture. The last component level represents the encapsulation in the function blocks. For the management of the entire component hierarchy in the KAS architecture a management system is developed. The management system is a system functionality of the KAS architecture and is encapsulated in its own partition. Another system function of the KAS architecture is the interface. This is also encapsulated in its own partition. The interface partition is the only partition that is allowed to communicate with outside of the core automation domain. In this work, application partitions for process control and simulation are developed as examples for the validation of the KAS architecture. These applications can be used for a prototype implementation of automation level scenarios. The results show that the KAS architecture provides a powerful and clearly manageable systemen vironment to meet the new requirements for agility as well as continuous interoperability of the automation level without compromising the integrity of the core automation.

Institutions

• Division of Materials Science and Engineering [520000]
• Chair of Information and Automation Systems for Process and Material Technology [526610]