Automated and Orchestrated CI/CD Pipelines in Industrial Protocol Certification Testing

The industrial automation industry is rapidly evolving, and with it, the way that industrial communication protocol certification testing is conducted. Protocol providers offer field device manufacturers conformance testing suites with integration interfaces, enabling them to embed these tests into their development cycle. However, there is a lack of clear instructions and readily available literature on how to build such integrated testing frameworks. This paper discusses the integration of two certification software suites, PROFINET and EthernetIP, into a regression test environment utilizing CI/CD pipelines and Azure DevOps cloud-based infrastructure. Automated orchestration facilitates the creation of a unit-to-validation test environment, accelerating time to market. Upon completion of this work, significant implications emerge regarding the traditional V-Model and the certification procedure. This paper details the work-achieved towards providing a complete verification and validation framework, presents performance characteristics to underline our arguments, and discusses the resulting impact on the traditional V-Model.