Alternatives for Flexible Deployment Architectures in Industrial Automation Systems
One of the main challenges of future industrial systems is to flexibly (re)deploy control applications on hardware controllers - a feature that is missing in most state of the art automation systems. Due to the heterogeneous structure of control systems, e.g. different standards and hardware, a silver bullet architecture for flexible deployment seems to be infeasible. Instead we propose an abstract architecture covering different concrete reconfiguration system architectures along with a taxonomy for design decisions for the realization of such a system. The capability of the abstract architecture is demonstrated by mapping three fundamentally different concrete reconfiguration system architectures and is verified on an industrial use case of a logistic system of an aluminum cold rolling plant.