Improve Manufacturing Operations, Scale, and Innovation with an Industrial Edge Platform
delivers open source industrial automation to the manufacturing shop floor
Challenge: Modernizing legacy industrial control systems
Fixed-function devices based on proprietary hardware and software, along with organizational silos, have slowed the pace of innovation in manufacturing processes. To reduce operating costs and downtime, industrial control systems must be reliable, flexible, scalable, portable, and easy to deploy. They must support best-in-class products with a guarantee of system interoperability without compromising agility or security, and they must run without failure and require minimal downtime for repairs or updates.
Solution: Building comprehensive nextgeneration control systems
To meet the needs of modern manufacturing, nextgeneration control systems will require a holistic solution—one that entails real-time shop floor control, artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML), and full IT manageability. These systems will need to deliver a managed, real-time, deterministic edge foundation for modernizing industrial control system deployments. The system architecture will need to be loosely coupled using portable microservices and should support workload consolidation. Additionally, the introduction of AI and vision at the edge—with AI intercepting the real-time control loop—will drive the need for greater compute at the edge.
The solution incorporates fully integrated, real-time capabilities—from silicon to software—to support industrial automation for predictable performance. The platform delivers a real-time kernel that provides lower latency and reduced jitter, helping applications run with greater reliability and the ability to self-heal with application/workload liveness and health checks. It also automates previously manual industrial automation tasks. 2 Solution Brief | Industrial Edge Platform for Distributed Control Systems To help simplify hardware and software integration, the platform is built on open standards and community-driven innovation. Additionally, Red Hat’s industry-leading enterprise developer support enables IT teams with best-in-class developer tools to help improve deployment consistency, regardless of deployment model or integrator, and further reduces choice paralysis around modern developer tooling. Red Hat also provides industrial-grade, mission-critical support to complement the do-it-yourself (DIY) aspects of adopting an open source platform.
- Fully integrated, real-time capabilities
From silicon to software—that provide predictable performance of timesensitive, industrial automation use cases.
- Advanced management and network automation
Utilize on-premises system deployment and management without the heavy-handed resource usage and tools based on open standards for simplified industrial network creation and management.
- Simplified AI workload integration
Leverage the ability to take an AI workload and run it next to a control workload. This will help simplify hardware complexity and enable AI to improve product quality, system uptime, and maintenance needs more easily.
- Enhanced cybersecurity posture
Remove human error elements with automated patching and updates, an immutable operating system plane, and a platform built on hardened, production-tested components.
- Scalability and flexibility
Benefit from a composable platform approach with isolated runtimes based on a microservice architecture that facilitates more-portable, scalable control and maximizes adaptability.
