Title
Disruption-free software updates in automation systems
Abstract
Automation systems must primarily be deterministic and reliable, especially in safety-critical environments. With recent trends such as mass customization or Industry 4.0, there is an increasing need for automation systems to be dynamic. Changing parts of the software of today's automation systems, however, typically requires rebooting the controller, which makes software updates a complex and costly endeavor often despised by operators. This article presents an approach to updating the software of automation systems at runtime without disrupting the system's operation. This is achieved with a combination of a component-based architecture, cyclic application execution, and a state transfer mechanism between the original and the updated version of a component. We validate our solution with a case study in which we update the control algorithm of a magnetic levitation device running at cycles of 1 kHz without dropping the ball.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1109/ETFA.2014.7005075
Emerging Technology and Factory Automation
Keywords
DocType
Citations 
control engineering computing,magnetic levitation,object-oriented programming,safety-critical software,software architecture,automation systems,component-based architecture,cyclic application execution,disruption-free software updates,magnetic levitation control algorithm,safety-critical environments,state transfer mechanism
Conference
1
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.37
12
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
michael wahler111410.45
Manuel Oriol241.49