I-MECH: realtime virtualization for industrial automation

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The typical systems used in industrial automation (e.g. for axis control) consist of a "black box" executing a commercial realtime operating system (RTOS) plus a set of control design tools meant to be run on a different desktop machine. This approach, besides imposing expensive royalties on the system integrator, often does not offer the desired degree of flexibility for testing/implementing novel solutions (e.g., running both control code and design tools on the same platform).

In the talk "I-MECH: realtime virtualization for industrial automation", Marco Solieri (from the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia), illustrated the work done in the context of the I-MECH project, aiming at effectively using virtualization techniques in the domain of industrial automation. In particular, an improved version of the Xen hypervisor has been used for running both the realtime control code (on the ERIKA Enterprise open-source RTOS) and the design tools on the same hardware, reducing the overall hardware costs.

Besides illustrating the overall software architecture and describing the various open-source components, the talk addressed the problem of interference on hardware resources shared by multiple OSes (which undermines the performance of the realtime part), showing the techniques implemented on Xen for preventing or reducing these problems.

After the talk, Evidence Srl showed a demo consisting of an EtherCAT master device based on the ERIKA Enterprise RTOS. The code, automatically generated from Simulink running on a different Xen guest, drove a Beckhoff EtherCAT slave connected to a DC motor.