Industrial Control Systems On Multi-­‐core

Abstract: In this work, we investigate the challenges that are faced when control systems are shifted from single--‐core processor to multi--‐core processor. Multi--‐core processors have been introduced for their good performance and energy consumption rate. To take advantage of this new solution, in most cases, the industrial applications need to be partitioned into small tasks in order to execute them in parallel on the multi--‐core platform. This transformation brings many benefits to the embedded system as well as challenges to the traditional Task management, such as the deployment of tasks onto different cores, the dependency problem among tasks while executing in parallel, as well as task scheduling and so on. Within this context, we introduce a multi--‐step approach to Deploy control systems applications, which are developed using the IEC61131--‐3 standard, to multi--‐core platforms. Our contribution in this work is that we have developed two engines to enable a smooth transfer. One is called partition engine, which will search a generated C code file and divide it into several separate small tasks. The other one is called deployment engine, which can allocate the divided tasks onto different cores. Based on this approach, we develop a prototype. And the test cases have proved that our approach is very effective and promising for further extension.