A Real-Time Reconfiguration Infrastructure for Distributed Embedded Control Systems

During the last decades production automation research has been focused on improving the flexibility and adaptability in order to cope with the arising challenges of mass customization. Much work was devoted to the higher-planning and scheduling-levels of automation systems. However, the lower level real-time control infrastructure was widely neglected. Therefore, we are currently faced with an adaptive flexible high level control connected to a rigid low level control. This work presents a dynamic reconfiguration architecture for the low level control of industrial automation systems. This architecture allows to reconfigure real-time control applications during full operation of the controlled plant. In an example implementation we prove that this is also possible on small embedded control devices as they are typically used as field devices in industrial automation systems.