Synchronous Reconfiguration of Distributed Embedded Applications During Operation

Speed of adaptation to changing demand is a critical success factor in factory automation. The key to speed is to enable agile development by independent engineer offices and equipment producers with industrial-grade microservice architectures. The expensive drawback is: While software components evolve over time, manufacturers have to integrate and deploy more and more updates during costly production stops. To avoid production stops as much as possible, we propose reconfiguration extensions to a real-time container architecture proposed earlier. The original container approach addresses both the functional and nonfunctional aspects of integrating embedded software components in late engineering phases. The extended approach allows modifications of the running distributed embedded application even during operation, while continuously ensuring reactivity of the system. The agents running on each node prepare the reconfiguration in background and then synchronously perform the required modifications according to a detailed reconfiguration plan. We demonstrate our concept by describing a synchronous API change between two distributed software components of a running gesture recognition system. An evaluation shows the feasibility of the concepts, but also calls for further research.