Precision timed industrial automation systems

For Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) that implement safety-critical industrial automation systems, timing correctness is as important as its functional correctness. Modern PLCs employ run-time environments and/or general purpose processors designed by ARM, Intel and Freescale to implement real-time systems. However, general purpose processors are designed to improve the average case performance and ignore the worst case performance. This makes it nearly impossible to guarantee the timing correctness of safety-critical applications. In this paper, we apply the recently developed PRET philosophy to propose Precision Timed Industrial Automation (PTIA) Systems for the design of precision timed industrial automation systems.