Deterministic networking for the industry with virtualised networks – DET4ALL

Within a decade we witnessed a fundamental change in industrial production with the generalisation of cyber physical system allowing automation of production; not only used for mass production but also for small series or even for individual or bespoke products.

In parallel to this evolution, the Internet world of digital communications has also fundamentally changed, driven by the new needs induced by the Cloud. Nowadays, provider networks and data-centers are conceived like a unified program instead of a set of communicating devices. This new approach allows one to manage their network according to their intents instead of according to the technology.

Surprisingly, while cyber physical system massively rely on digital communications (e.g., to allow collaborative robots, for data analytics…), industrial networks are still managed and conceived as collections of independent communicating units instead of one unified piece of software.

The reason why the shift of paradigm did not occur yet to industrial digital communication networks can be found in the major discrepancy between the Internet and the industrial digital communication systems. While Internet based services assume best-effort delivery, industrial networks generally impose strong determinism and real-time constraints. As a result, industrial networks have a propensity of being physically segregated such that malfunctions of a system does not have effects on the others.

Because of the constraints of the industrial world, the techniques used in the “Internet” cannot be directly used. However with the DET4ALL project, we propose to transpose the concept of network programability to the world of industrial communicating systems. To that aim, we will propose the essential building blocks that will allow to virtualise industrial networks. First, we will conceive new algorithms to automatically provision the various components constituting industrial networks, according to their real-time requirements. In parallel, we will propose new Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) that allow operators to specify their communication needs and constraints in a dynamic and programatic way instead of by means of static tables. Finally, we will propose new mechanisms to automatically update communication infrastructures such that industrial operators will be able to modify on-the-fly their means of production without service interruption or degradation. All this simply by programming their intents and in all confidence as all our algorithms will be proven to be correct, in all circumstances.

The impact of the project DET4ALL goes beyond technological advances; it will also bring a new vision on what production tools can become, namely agile systems in perpetual evolution.