End-to-end Redundancy between Real-time I4.0 Components based on Time-Sensitive Networking

To increase the changeability of future production systems, assets have to provide a standardized representation of their capabilities. Therefore, the concept of I4.0 components was developed, which describes assets with an asset administration shell providing a self-description. Real-time I4.0 components, like safety critical systems or motion control applications, require a deterministic communication with bounded low latency. Moreover, they demand for redundant connections to achieve fault tolerance with respect to the network infrastructure and the components. The integration of redundancy mechanisms in realtime I4.0 components requires additional implementation and configuration effort, which has not been covered in detail yet. In this work, we extend the concept of asset administration shells to configure end-to-end redundancy between real-time I4.0 components. Thereby, we apply the new real-time communication technology Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) with focus on the standard IEEE 802.1CB. Finally, we evaluate the performance of the redundancy implementation in terms of the transmission offset between the primary frame and its duplicate.