Real-time capable OPC-UA Programs over TSN for distributed industrial control

A key aspect of Industry 4.0 is the continuous interconnectedness of components. The standardized industrial communication protocol OPC UA offers a solution to this problem by enabling the exchange of data between the shop floor level and the inter-enterprise level. Due to the integration of the Time Sensitive Network (TSN) into OPC UA, it is now even possible to exchange information in real-time. Especially on the shop floor, there are numerous heterogeneous distributed devices from sensors to robots which must communicate with each other in real-time to achieve a distributed industrial control. Therefore, we propose an approach to combine real-time communication over TSN with OPC UA Programs to synchronize multiple distributed OPC UA Programs and exchange process data between them without losing real-time guarantees. This can be seen as the enabler of Plug-and-Produce with real-time requirements.