Virtualization in Industrial Production - A Survey Focusing on Virtual and Virtualized Industrial Controls

Manufacturing industry strives for product-centric production lines, where versatile products shape the manufacturing process. Consequently, production lines will be subdivided into mobile modules to enable the desired versatility. This modularization increases the demand for more flexible production systems. The use of virtualized components, especially virtualized control systems, in industry is likely to provide the required flexibility for future production scenarios. This paper briefly overviews virtualization in industrial automation by first presenting the fundamentals of virtualization in general and then describing different system structures for virtualized industrial control systems. Furthermore, the background of virtualized and virtual components in other contexts is examined and an outlook on the application of virtualized and virtual industrial controls is given.