Demonstration of Industrial Ethernet Protocol Softwarization and Advanced Motion Control for Full Software-Defined Factory Network

Factory networks are typically implemented using dedicated network protocols due to their strict accuracy and latency requirements. However, these protocols tie the factory to specific equipment vendors, making it difficult to introduce other protocols. In response to this challenge, we propose a novel architecture to build a full software-defined factory network by softwarization of industrial Ethernet protocol functions, implementation of a motion control application in a general language, and control of the data plane from the network controller. We demonstrate advanced motion control from a software-defined control system utilizing an industrial Ethernet protocol on a general-purpose server and verify the effectiveness of the proposed architecture. Our proposal makes it possible to control various industrial devices from different vendors without changing applications by mediating the data stored in various protocols through drivers for each protocol. Our experimental findings demonstrate that the PROFINET software-based motion control system can be successfully implemented. The results also show that the proposed architecture can achieve successful motor control within 11.5 s by utilizing the delay compensation method.