Real-time properties for design of heterogeneous industrial automation systems

Scenarios for future industrial production, e.g., cyber-physical production systems, Industrie 4.0 or cloud manufacturing rely on the integration of heterogeneous physical production equipment, automation and IT systems. Moreover, a dynamic reconfiguration of these systems shall be possible without or with minimal work effort and system downtime. These requirements entail the consideration of timing aspects throughout all involved systems, which can ideally be employed by algorithms that support the dynamic reconfiguration. For this purpose, the paper introduces a generic terminology and metrics for the design of heterogeneous real-time systems.