Container-Based Control Execution for Legacy-Compatible Redundancy
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Solution Overview
Problem
Industrial process control and automation systems face challenges in upgrading components while maintaining compatibility with legacy technology, especially in distributed control systems where redundancy is crucial, as existing controllers often require compatibility with new upgraded controllers to ensure system availability.
Innovation Solution
A high availability industrial control system utilizing a container-based architecture with nodes supporting container runtime services, enabling communication and redundancy management, and a management network for detecting failures and redistributing containers across heterogeneous nodes, ensuring seamless operation and load balancing.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Adaptability or versatility
If upgraded controllers are introduced to improve system performance, then system capabilities are enhanced, but compatibility with legacy controllers becomes problematic
Solution Approach 1:
The controller functionality is segmented into separate software containers that can be independently deployed and managed. This allows upgraded control algorithms to be packaged in separate containers from the legacy operating system and hardware interface layers, enabling performance improvements without compromising compatibility with existing legacy controllers.
Solution Approach 2:
The container platform provides universal support for multiple controller versions and configurations. By standardizing the runtime environment and interface protocols, the system can simultaneously host both upgraded and legacy controllers with consistent behavior, ensuring reliability across heterogeneous controller populations.
2Reliability
If redundancy is implemented to improve system availability, then system reliability is enhanced, but system complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
Multiple container instances providing redundancy are merged into a unified container ecosystem managed by a single container platform. The platform handles failover coordination, state synchronization, and resource management across redundant containers, reducing the operational complexity that would otherwise arise from managing separate redundant systems.
Solution Approach 2:
Redundant controller functionality is implemented through container copying rather than hardware duplication. Container images can be rapidly replicated across multiple nodes, and the container platform manages the copying, deployment, and synchronization of redundant instances, significantly reducing the complexity compared to traditional hardware-based redundancy schemes.
3Reliability
If container redistribution is implemented to handle failures, then system resilience is improved, but communication overhead increases
Solution Approach 1:
The container platform pre-establishes communication channels and synchronization mechanisms between redundant containers before failures occur. Health monitoring and failover readiness are maintained in advance through periodic heartbeats and state pre-synchronization, reducing the communication overhead required during actual failure events compared to reactive approaches.
Data Source
AI summary
In an industrial automation system, a control device adapted to a container-based architecture has been developed. The control device may comprise one or more containers instantiated with control execution application, communication application, and or redundancy management application.