Self-reconfiguration of real-time communication in cyber-physical systems

Today, in domains like automation and robotics systems consist of various sensors and computation nodes. Due to the temporal dependency in quality of measured data, such Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) commonly have real-time requirements on communication. In addition, these systems shall become more flexible and scalable, e.g., by adding new components to the CPS. This would be most suitable if a CPS could react to the presence of a new component and reconfigure itself to run afterward with the new component integrated to the CPS. This capability is covered by the term Plug-and-Produce. In this paper, we propose a concept to enable Plug-and-Produce within a CPS whose network uses different communication media, e.g., Ethernet and CAN. To enable real-time communication provided by different communication protocols, their different synchronization mechanisms have to be combined to get a common time base within the entire system. For this purpose, we consider Ethernet as well as CAN-based real-time communication protocols and their synchronization mechanisms. The proposed concept for self-reconfiguration aims to be integrated into our three layered software architecture that is presented as well.