SEINE: Automatic Self-configuration of Industrial Networks

The emergence of new production paradigms, such as Industry 4.0, comes with the promise of more efficient, costeffective, and flexible production systems. The traditional communication infrastructures in the automation domain support the requirements on reliability and timing predictability but at the cost of low accessibility of data and increased complexity of network configurations. Consequently, the configuration of large industrial networks (like Profinet and Time-Sensitive Networking) becomes unmanageable using the state-of-the-art configuration techniques. The existing techniques mainly support static configurations of the network that are performed at the design time. If the network needs to be reconfigured to meet dynamic needs at runtime, then parts of the system or even the entire system is shut down, reconfigured and then restarted. This makes these adaptations very costly and hampers with the realisation of the industry of the future with existing infrastructures.

To address this challenge and bridge the gap in the state of the art, SEINE's vision is to support the networks with novel configuration mechanisms to automatically adapt to changes at run-time, providing the timing predictability and reliability guarantees, without disrupting the correct operation of the systems. We aim at realising this vision by developing novel techniques to provide the Automatic Network Configurator, which will have the complete view of the network capabilities and requirements. We will focus on Ethernet-based real-time networks, like Profinet and Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN), that offer a promising solution to provide high-bandwidth, low-latency, and predictable backbone communication for industrial communication systems.

The proposed configurator is envisaged to consist of several mechanisms including: (i) automatic network monitoring, (ii) automatic network configuration and dynamic reconfiguraiton, (iii) feasibility and predictability verification, and (iv) configuration deployment. The project consortium consists of three partners, including the project coordinator Mälardalen University (MDU), ABB and Arcticus Systems. The project will also develop proof-of-concept prototypes of the techniques by extending the Rubus tool chain (provided by Arcticus), which has been used in the industry for over 25 years. The project will also develop an integrated industrial demonstrator to validate the results in ABB’s industrial settings. A unique trait of this consortium is that it offers a clear value chain from development of new techniques in academia (MDU); through their implementation in industrial tool prototypes by a tools developer (Arcticus Systems); to their utilisation by an end user of the technology in the industry (ABB); and back-propagation of the feedback on usability of the techniques and tool prototypes for their refinement. The project is planned to start in December 2023 and will run for 3 years.

SEINE's vision is to support the networks with novel configuration mechanisms to automatically adapt to changes at run-time, providing the timing predictability and reliability guarantees, without disrupting the correct operation of the systems.

Project objective

The overall objective of SEINE is to develop novel techniques, industrial tools and validators to support automatic self-configuration of predictable industrial communication networks.