OPART: Towards an Open Platform for Abstraction of real-time communication in cross-domain applications

Developing real-time communication in various application fields such as robotics, factory automation, etc. is one the most important steps achieving a deterministic system. However, the development of this step is very complex and requires low level and advanced knowledge about the real-time communication systems. This complexity decelerates the developing process specially in cross-domain applications e.g. surgical control applications in Networked Medical Systems (NMS) requiring real-time communication and deterministic system behavior. General complexities developing real-time communication systems are classified. The architecture of an Open Platform for Abstraction of Real-Time Communication (OPART) is introduced for reducing these complexities. The architecture of OPART is based on the Ethernet-based real-time communication protocol openPOWERLINK. An experimental setup of OPART using a medical sensor and actuator is demonstrated.