Manufacturing enterprises need a standard encapsulated architecture to simplify complex work and improve engineering development efficiency. ExOS enables the coordination between the rich computing resources in the IT world and the control of the OT world to meet the needs of digital transformation.

Digitalization is to use digital design, analysis, and operation tools to tap the potential in production to improve quality, cost, and delivery capabilities. The demand of the market, the promotion of technology, and the enterprise’s own innovation drive make the computing tasks used to solve analysis, optimization, and strategy problems more demanding. Moreover, these tasks must be effectively combined with the on-site control tasks to form a larger closed loop.

The demand for integration of control and computing is widespread

In many equipment fields such as electronics and semiconductors, photovoltaic, lithium batteries, pharmaceuticals, and heat treatment, even without considering today’s so-called “digital transformation” trend, the demand for data in these fields has long existed.

A large number of computing software needs to run on IT systems. For example, for the platform of product design and engineering verification, today, not only these software needs to be simulated, but also interact with runtime software, just like the interaction between MATLAB/Simulink and the control system platform. The production operation analysis software shall provide data report support for quality and production improvement, and can issue improvement instructions to the OT real-time control system. And the process analyst can mine the optimal parameter combination from these data and send it to the control system in real time. It is also hoped that AI can find the ability to improve quality, reduce costs, and optimize parameters in a large amount of data – and learn the experience hidden in the technicians’ brains, make it explicit, and reuse knowledge.

These “edge computing” tasks usually require OT sampling and transmission, then IT software analysis and optimization, and then OT execution to form a large closed loop. However, for a long time, there has been a big difference between IT and the OT world. First of all, in order to obtain the real-time and certainty of communication, the industry usually adopts polling or token mechanisms such as POWERLINK, PROFINET, Ethernet/IP, etc., while the IT network adopts the “best effort” design idea. In terms of operating system, industrial tasks are based on the design of “isochronous synchronization”, and real-time operating system (RTOS) is adopted, while IT system is based on the universal operating system of preemptive multitasking, such as Windows.

In application development, OT usually develops control tasks based on IEC61131-3 or C/C++. However, for many IT systems, Java, Python, and Docker give better play to their advantages. The code, algorithm, and software accumulated in the business world are rich available resources, which are like gold mines to be mined and used by the industry.

These differences lead to integration barriers between IT and OT, which are not disconnected. However, it leads to a lot of additional work, such as additional hardware conversion and software interface quantities for the system. Therefore, a standard encapsulated architecture is needed to “simplify” these complex works, improve the efficiency of engineering development, and make the IT world’s rich computing resources and the OT world’s control form a synergy to meet the needs of digital transformation.