Control–Communication–Computing Co-Design in Cyber–Physical Production System

The cyber–physical production system (CPPS) has practical requirements, such as distributed, reconfigurable, and high-performance, which bring a new challenge to performance guarantee of remote manufacturing with time delay under shared resources. Time delay has a great influence on system performance, and the mainstream methods mainly reduce its influence by optimizing control. However, due to the uncertainty of time delays, the existing methods have great limitations, and the configuration complexity is high. To address this issue, we take teleoperation as the control model, then we introduce 5G slicing and edge computing technologies to turn this control problem into a control–communication–computing co-design problem. An industrial teleoperation testbed is implemented to help clarify this problem and explore the key points in solving it. Then, a novel co-design teleoperation platform (CdTP) is designed that can quantitatively describe the relationship between the time delay and system configuration. Based on CdTP, system performance assurance does not have to be achieved by blindly increasing the total amount of resources, but can be achieved by improving the utilization of shared control–communication–computing resources. In addition, CdTP can dynamic configure resources based on changing requirements, which make it combines flexibility, real time, and reliability. Finally, we propose a resource allocation method to minimize the maximum job delay. The evaluation and experimental results indicate that our platform can achieve an all-in-one configuration, and validation of the proposed method is conducted to provide deterministic delay guarantees.