Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source software solutions, announced the launch of a new industrial edge platform designed in partnership with Intel to provide a modern approach to creating and operating industrial controls.

The platform brings standard IT technologies to the factory floor and uses real-time insights to transform the way manufacturers operate, scale, and innovate, enabling industrial control system (ICS) vendors, system integrators (SI), and manufacturers to automate previously manual system development, deployment, and management tasks and reduce cybersecurity risks. Optimize plant flexibility with prescriptive and predictive maintenance, run deterministic and nondeterministic workloads on the same servers, and reduce turnaround times.

The Industrial Edge platform is designed to provide a comprehensive solution ranging from real-time scene control and artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) to full IT management capabilities, giving customers more choice in data gravity or edge-to-cloud architecture, and improving overall device efficiency (OEE). To support these efforts, Red Hat and Intel are integrating the Intel Platform, Intel Edge Controls for Industrial (Intel ECI), and current and future versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. And to start by collaborating on upstream Linux social media such as the Fedora project and CentOS Stream. This collaboration extends controllers and platforms to Red Hat Device Edge (Early Access), Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, and Red Hat OpenShift. Based on the above cooperation, companies can benefit from:

To support this platform, Red Hat will work with Intel to provide the just-in-time core that ensures consistent latency and reduces jitter, helping applications repeat with greater reliability. This new industrial edge platform will be created on top of open standards and social media-driven innovation, driven by thousands of developers around the world, enabling simpler integration with other hardware and software components. In addition, the transparency of the core code, the clear blueprint and the release cycle help users avoid guessing when new versions and corresponding features will be released. Red Hat’s industry-leading enterprise developer support provides IT teams with a best-in-class developer toolchain that delivers greater deployment consistency regardless of deployment model or integrator, eliminating the guesswork and choice of tools for modern developers.

PXI-6123

01The closed and specific nature of automated communication protocols still exists

At present, in the production workshop, enterprises are using bus technology to realize the interconnection of automation equipment, but this way can only solve the basic data collection and coordination problems. For a long time, the field of industrial automation involves a wide variety of hardware equipment, there are closed and specific, hardware and software depth binding, communication protocols and interfaces are not unified, poor reusability. If the traditional centralized control method is adopted, different protocols need to be converted, and the phenomenon of software “hardening” is serious in the process of system integration. In addition, for those older devices, the control system is expensive to maintain and upgrade, and users are never able to really penetrate the software environment to break down the barriers.

From a market point of view, automation system manufacturers have been evolving around the “hardware + software” bundle model, even if the same supplier of PLC, servo, inverter and other different products, often have their own adaptation software, to the customer in product selection, programming, product parameter setting bring a lot of inconvenience. There is only limited interaction with the controller through the configuration tools provided by the vendor.

Today, with the rapid development of IT technology, the closed and specific nature of communication protocols greatly hinder the upgrade and migration of automation control software, as well as the deep and efficient integration of OT and IT, and a large number of information islands exist.