Publication
Controller of Controllers Architecture for Management of Heterogeneous Industrial Networks
Frimpong Ansah; Santiago Soler Perez Olaya; Dennis Krummacker; Christoph Fischer; Alexander Winkel; René Guillaume; Lukas Wisniewski; Marco Ehrlich; Waseem Mandarawi; Henning Trsek; Hans Dieter Schotten; others
In: 2020 16th IEEE International Conference on Factory Communication Systems (WFCS). IEEE International Conference on Factory Communication Systems (WFCS-2020), located at 16th IEEE International Conference on Factory Communication Systems, April 27-29, Pages 1-8, ISBN Electronic ISBN: 978-1-7281-5297-4, IEEE Xplore, 2020.
Abstract
Increasing heterogeneity of industrial network systems is a fact and the chances that in the future one communication standard will be able to fulfill the requirements of all possible applications are utopian. With the increasing number of communication systems, their management, configuration, and maintenance become a significant issue. Additionally, due to the increasing amount of network services and traffic, the management of available network resources and the possibility of delivering certain levels of communication quality of service, especially across different network solutions becomes a big challenge. Therefore, in this paper a Controller of Controllers (CoC) concept for management of heterogeneous industrial networks is proposed. The concept is designed to support still widely spread legacy fieldbus systems, different Ethernetbased industrial solutions, and potentially upcoming network technologies. The goal is achieved by leveraging state-of-theart architectural concepts such as software-defined networks, which allows for integration of abstract models in network management. The concept is described and discussed by way of a demonstrator concept for a heterogeneous system of fieldbus and Ethernet-based time-sensitive networks.