RTiPS-4-IIoT: Real-Time Publish/Subscribe for the Industrial Internet of Things (DFG)

In the context of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), the RTiPS-4-IIoT project is located in a future Smart Factory, which is characterized by seamless integration of all information technology, maximum flexibility, and close cooperation between humans, robots, and artificial intelligence. Applications in a smart factory range from controlling production with hard real-time requirements, to augmented reality environments with soft real-time requirements, to best-effort traffic connecting to in-house information systems and office IT. Implementing these differentiated real-time requirements in a converged network infrastructure is a particular challenge. A converged network infrastructure for this scenario should enable flexible and largely decoupled m:n communication due to the mentioned requirements and support several real-time traffic classes including hard real-time. Implementation is provided by publish/subscribe communication, which is already being propagated and used by some standards, products, and projects in the context of the IIoT. However, existing approaches did not support hard real-time conditions because the flexibility of publish/subscribe is difficult to combine with the predictability of hard real-time. With new capabilities in software-defined networking (SDN) and time-sensitive networking (TSN), this combination is now possible and very promising. The project is therefore exploring a converged network infrastructure for a future smart factory that supports application-specific and different-stringing real-time requirements and realizes these through publish/subscribe communication and software-defined networking. First of all, the modeling of real-time requirements in the context of publish/subscribe communication is examined, and then, based on the developed models, the planning of the communication relationships and their implementation in the network are explored by means of SDN and TSN. As the project proceeds, it develops non-disruptive system reconfiguration procedures that do not violate guaranteed real-time conditions, and ensures that planning scales to larger scenarios.

15.09.2019 - 14.03.2022