Space division of processing power for feed forward and feed back control in complex production and packaging machinery

Since production and packaging machinery with hundreds of sensors and actuators get faster and more complex at the same time, new demands come up to the real-time capacity of the machinery´s controller. This article takes an analysis of timing problems caused by the commonly used time-slicing of the CPU as a task scheduling strategy and its effects on the real-time behavior of complex PLC programs. Furthermore, previous studies on reconfigurable FPGA based controller hardware are discussed. In conclusion we suggest a design approach for a scalable multi-processor architecture based on FPGA technology. Thereby the main focus of our design is set to the real-time capacity of the multi-task controller.