cloudAutomation

Introduction: Industrial Automation as a Cloud Service

Current large-scale industrial automation systems are offered at a very high cost and take months or even years to start up. A large part of the development/engineering time and cost is due to the reliance on physical controllers. In this project, we

• Answer the question: “Can industrial automation benefit from cloud computing to reduce costs and deployment time?”
• Design an architecture for providing industrial automation as a cloud service.
• Design a delay compensation method to mitigate roundtrip Internet delays.
• Design a distributed fault tolerance approach to mitigate controller and link failures.
• Evaluate our approach on commercial cloud using a physical model of a solar power plant hosted in our lab.

Can industrial automation benefit from cloud computing to reduce costs and deployment time?

We develop simplified mathematical models to compute the savings in cost and time that would be achieved by the proposed system. We use a case study inspired by large real-life automation systems to evaluate the potential cost and time savings. Our study shows that the cloud-based automation approach can (i) save at least 43% of the total cost and up to 57% in some cases, and (ii) save 25-85% of the time needed to get the system ready to start up. Thus, our analysis confirms that success of the cloud computing model in other application domains can be extended to industrial automation.

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Total cost saving under proposed cloud-based automation system for different values of labor saving (s_L) ranging from 0.1 to 0.8.

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Total Time to Start Up (TTSU) saving under proposed cloud-based automation system for different values of engineering time saving (s_E).

Transforming current industrial automation architecture into a cloud-based architecture

Current systems are expensive and take a long time to set up. On the other hand, our proposed architecture saves cost and time and simplifies the design of control rooms.

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Current industrial automation system architecture.

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Proposed architecture for industrial automation as a service.

How we test our approach?

We use commercial (Amazon) cloud to host industrial controllers to control a physical model of a solar power plant hosted in our lab. We also use industry-standard emulation for testing under large disturbance.

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Process diagram of the solar power plant.

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Physical model of the solar power plant.

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One of the commercial analog I/O modules with TCP/Ethernet capabilities used in our evaluation.

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