Control-as-a-service from the cloud: A case study for using virtualized PLCs

Abstract

Cloud computing has recently emerged as a new computing paradigm in many application areas comprising office and enterprise systems. It offers various solutions to provide a dynamic and flexible infrastructure to host computing resources and deliver them as a service on-demand. Since industrial automation systems of the future have to be adaptable and agile, cloud computing can be considered as a promising solution for this area. However, the requirements of industrial automation systems differ significantly from the office and enterprise world. In this paper we describe a case study that implements a concept of PLC as a service within a cloud based infrastructure and provides a performance evaluation with respect to legacy PLCs

Low-Level Control of 3D Printers from the Cloud: A Step toward 3D Printer Control as a Service

“…Moreover, in CaaS, a variety of control algorithms could be offered in an "app marketplace", where they are accessed if and when needed by a given device. For more details on the various benefits of CaaS, see [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16].…”

“…The solutions to QoS issues presented in the discussed preliminary studies have yielded encouraging results: they have generally demonstrated that, with proper mitigation of QoS issues, cloud-based controllers can approach the performance of equivalent local controllers. However, the aspiration of CaaS is for cloud-based controllers to surpass the Cloud-based control in the context of CaaS seeks to perform low-level computations for real-time control of a device in the Cloud, instead of on a local controller [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16]. In the specific case of 3D printers, this implies that stepper motor commands (or similar low-level signals) are computed in and sent out from the cloud-based controller, as opposed to G-codes (see Figure 1b).…”

“…Several preliminary studies have been conducted to test the feasibility of cloud-based real-time control of devices, and approaches to mitigate QoS issues. One of the earliest works in this regard was that by Givehchi et al [3] who made a case for cloud-based programmable logic controllers (PLCs) in industrial automation. Their results showed lower performance using the cloud-based PLC compared to a local PLC, due to network-induced delays, particularly as real-time computation demands became more stringent.…”

Low-Level Control of 3D Printers from the Cloud:  A Step Toward 3D Printer Control as a Service

“…Control as a Service (CaaS) is an idea that has been growing in popularity over the past few years [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16]. In CaaS, low-level control functionalities of a device are moved out of a local controller to the Cloud, where they are remotely accessed on-demand (i.e., as a service).…”

An Extensible Real Time Capable Server Architecture for Edge Computing

“…A recent work done by Givehchi, Imtiaz, Trsek, and Jasperneite [8] studies industrial use cases for using virtual control service in a private Cloud. Instead of using hardware programmable logic controllers (PLC) on site, they use a computer with multi-core processor and set each core as a virtual PLC to control sensors and actuators.…”