Free Software and Open-Source Hardware for Industrial Automation

Emerging technologies are aiming to fully automate the manufacturing process on the factory shop floor. However, industrial automation is often hampered by interoperability and vendor lock-in challenges due to heterogeneous components and environments. Replacement of these components is costly and even lower price devices will pose new technology gaps and shortcomings in interoperability capabilities thus slowing down manufacturing processes and causing additional costs. True industrial automation and integration requires interoperability and free software as well as open source hardware are two means to eliminate interoperability blockers and also benefit from reduced costs. As part of the Open Source Industrial Edge (OSIE) project, we are working with open source and open hardware devices using Open Platform Communication Unified Architecture (OPC UA) for vendor-independent unified communication. In this paper we develop an end-to-end open source industrial use case to control input/output pins using a Virtual Programmable Logic Controller (vPLC). We validated our deterministic communication with a test-bed made up from an edge server and a field level device. The test results present a detailed overview of the latency and jitter observed during communication.