Lightweight Virtualized Industrial Edge Runtime for Software-Defined Automation in Flexible Manufacturing Systems

Abstract

Industrial Internet and edge computing provide massive computing resources to legacy industrial automation systems. It also poses critical challenges in handling massive customization requirements. Due to high reconfiguration delays, existing automation systems cannot adapt to those changes in real-time. This article proposes a virtualized industrial edge runtime for software-defined automation systems with a lightweight architecture, rapid startup, fast application launch, and dynamic resource allocation. The proposed runtime system enables dynamic resource reconfiguration with a low memory footprint to address high deployment latency. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can significantly reduce response time and memory usage, thereby meeting real-time constraints for software-defined automation systems.