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Industry events are back! While this year’s Hanover Fair was much smaller, the quality of the visitors was especially high, the industrial community is clearly ready to return to normal with personal contacts and business travel. ARC has identified the most interesting topics from the trade show and will present them to you in this “@Hanover Fair 2022” series.
PLC-as-a-Service
Software-define-everything is common in the IT world as hardware-based functions are systematically being replaced by software. But can this concept be applied to real-time control of industrial machinery? The answer is YES, but only if the right framework is in place to program, deploy and monitor the performance of virtualized automation assets.
Software Defined Automation (SDA) is the concept of virtualizing traditional automation hardware to manage it like a software asset. SDA is also the name of a start-up company that demonstrated its solution at the AWS partner booth at the Hanover Fair. The company’s PLC Ops Suite for automation engineers enables Industrial-Control-as-a-Service by virtualizing commercially available PLCs via a digital twin of the controller. Factory automation practitioners benefit from hardware independent remote connectivity, simplified collaborative PLC engineering, and virtual PLCs with real-time deterministic behavior running on standard IT hardware. The vPLC solution allows the execution of deterministic real-time control on virtualized edge servers in combination with a comprehensive vPLC management interface in the cloud. Together with Cloud Automation Engineering solution, it enables customers to improve flexibility, productivity, and security while at the same time gaining independence from vendor-specific industrial automation hardware.
SDA’s solution supports customers migrating from conventional PLCs to fully virtualized PLC controls running on the VMware Edge Compute Stack on conventional IT servers next to the shop floor. Automation engineers can continue to work with vPLCs as with conventional PLCs via a cloud-based control plane. SDA’s cloud application allows users to commission, manage, and monitor vPLC instances from servers located in the factory. According to SDA, virtual real-time controllers achieve deterministic control cycle times of <10ms.
Hanover Fair 2022
After an unprecedented 3-year hiatus, the Hanover Fair returned last month in a more compact format, but with a surprisingly high level of enthusiasm among exhibitors and visitors. Tired of video conferences and virtual events, 75,000 industry players attended the 4-day event that was postponed earlier this year from its traditional April timeslot. Despite its reduced size, the show did not disappoint, and exhibitors expressed a high level of satisfaction with the quality of contacts.