SPACE DIVISION OF PROCESSING POWER FOR FEED FORWARD AND FEED BACK CONTROL IN COMPLEX PRODUCTION AND PACKAGING MACHINERY

ABSTRACT — Since production and packaging machinery with hundreds of sensors and actuators get faster and more complex at the same time, new demands come up to the real-time capacity of the machinery’s controller. This article takes an analysis of timing problems caused by the commonly used time-slicing of the CPU as a task scheduling strategy and its effects on the real-time behavior of complex PLC programs. Furthermore, previous studies on reconfigurable FPGA based controller hardware are discussed. In conclusion we suggest a design approach for a scalable multi-processor architecture based on FPGA technology. Thereby the main focus of our design is set to the real-time capacity of the multi-task controller. Key Words: PLC; PAC; real-time processing; multi-processor; FPG