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CODESYS® Virtual PLC Demo

This overview shows the exemplary structure of a CODESYS Virtual Control.

The setup:

Orchestration

CODESYS Automation Server hosted on one device

Further information: automation-server.com

vPLC

2 x CODESYS Virtual Control SL
1 x CODESYS Virtual Safe Control SL
1 x CODESYS Edge Gateway SL

Further information: CODESYS Virtual Control SL

Container

Podman, for Intel® with CAT enabled

Operating system

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 9.2 with PREEMPT_RT
Kernel-based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Real Time

Red Hat Device Edge provides the flexibility to deploy and manage workloads on small, resource constrained devices at scale. It combines Red Hat Enterprise Linux with MicroShift, a lightweight Kubernetes distribution from Red Hat OpenShift, so users can deploy anything from traditional Linux workloads to complex containerized services using Kubernetes.

Hardware

Multi-core IPC with Intel® Time Coordinated Computing (TCC) " "Real-Time Computing at the Edge" (intel.com)
and Cache Allocation Technology (CAT) " https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/technical/intel-sdm.html

Intel® Core(TM) i7-1185GRE Tiger Lake UP3

Network

Cisco Catalyst Industrial Ethernet switches guarantee stable, secure real-time access to the I/Os of software-defined automation in machines and systems.

Cisco SD-Access Architecture Network Components "Fabric in a box"

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/solutions/CVD/Campus/cisco-sda-design-guide.html#SDAccessArchitectureNetworkComponents

For further information:
https://blogs.cisco.com/internet-of-things/is-it-time-to-virtualize-your-factory-floor?ccid=cc002643&oid=pstit031879

Fieldbus

Two independent Ethernet-based fieldbus systems from one Ethernet port with vLAN, powered by XDP

AI application / workload consolidation

  • Live stream object segmentation with OpenVINO™ YOLOv8 AI container.
  • Models accelerated in hardware with OpenVINO™
  • OpenVINO™ is an open-source toolkit for optimizing a deep learning model from virtually any framework and deploying it with best-in-class performance on a range of Intel® processors and other hardware platforms.
  • YOLOv8 is a state-of-the-art model from Ultralytics that recognizes and segments predefined objects
This overview shows the exemplary setup with the CODESYS Automation Server.

Data of the bundle setups:

Application

100 FB calls
100 operators
50 Profisafe host instances
Simple mapping Input → Output
Cycle time 5 ms

CODESYS Virtual Control SL

With AI workload, Intel CAT deactivated

Cycle time 27 µs
Max. Task jitter: 77 µs
Average Ethernet send time: 4.5 µs
Average Ethernet receive time: 3.4 µs

With AI workload, Intel CAT activated

Cycle time: 20 µs
Max. Task Jitter: 11 µs
Average Ethernet Send Time: 2.8 µs
Average Ethernet Receive Time: 3.2 µs

Cycle Time: 2.3 ms
Roundtrip time safe protocol: 25 ms

CODESYS Virtual Safe Control SL

With AI workload, Intel CAT deactivated

Cycle time: 2.3 ms
Roundtrip time safe protocol: 25 ms

With AI workload, Intel CAT activated

Cycle time: 1.6 ms
FSoE roundtrip time safe protocol: 10 ms

Advantages of Virtual PLCs:

Cost savings

Replace n physical PLCs with a single platform with n virtual controllers.

Scalability

Do you need a small controller for a small logic task? Or a fully-fledged motion controller? No problem - with CODESYS Virtual Control you can implement both on a suitable device at the click of a mouse. The corresponding license turns the whole thing into a small controller or a motion controller.

Less space and wiring required

Is the space in your control cabinet full? Is your 24VDC power supply already working to capacity? Don't worry: You don't need new cables or an additional power supply on your central computer for an additional CODESYS Virtual Control. As for your I/Os, you can connect them via Industrial Ethernet anyway.

Flexible orchestration

Are you a Linux nerd? Do you like using web tools? Do you want to concentrate exclusively on your automation tasks? Simply use Linux scripts and tools such as Kubernetes/OpenShift to set up CODESYS Virtual Control - or use the CODESYS Automation Server. This administration platform works without any knowledge of Linux. And the bonus of the latest Intel platforms with Intel® TCC Cache Allocation Technology: They guarantee the real-time capability of your CODESYS Virtual Control PLCs!

Security-by-Design

Protect your control system by intelligently splitting up application parts and encapsulating them in the container. For updates or in the event of attacks, you can simply shut down and restart affected parts - without affecting the overall system. CODESYS Virtual Control makes it easy for you - just like microservices in IT.

Maintenance made easy

Security vulnerability identified! Hundreds of PLCs are affected. You need to update the firmware or the application as soon as possible. This can take days, weeks or even months! Except your PLCs run as virtual systems on a central computer. In this case, you can carry out the update in a few seconds. CODESYS Virtual Control makes it possible!

Flexibility

New function in your machine = new hardware? Not necessarily! Simply add a new virtual PLC and use it to implement the new function. With CODESYS Virtual Control, you no longer need to use new hardware to implement new functions.

SoftSafety

Realize virtual safety control in accordance with IEC 61508 SIL3 through Diversified Encoding.

Efficiency through consolidation of the workload

Take full advantage of the latest Intel platforms with Intel® TCC Cache Allocation Technology: Run your performance-intensive AI workloads, such as error detection or object segmentation, in parallel with your CODESYS Virtual Control PLCs on the same system - while maintaining the real-time capability of the PLCs!