David Hellmanns gives talk about Operational Technology networks on Monday

On Monday, May 30, 2022 at 13:00, David Hellmanns will give a talk about the real-time requirements of Operational Technology networks at the COMSYS seminar room. David is a PhD candidate with IPVS Uni Stuttgart and Hirschmann Automation and Control, and he is also a former student at COMSYS. Hence, we're happy to host David's talk on Monday.

Abstract:

Industrial networks have been isolated islands in a world with exponentially increasing communication needs. However, trends such as Industry 4.0, smart manufacturing, and edge computing drive the desire for open architectures. Besides safety concerns, one main aspect of the isolation of Operational Technology (OT) networks is the prevalence of mutually incompatible communication technologies in OT networks, such as Profinet, EtherCAT, or Sercos III. With the introduction of IEEE Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN), a new candidate to unify the communication technologies in OT networks was proposed. TSN  not only has the potential to unify communication technologies within OT, but it delivers compatibility with IEEE Ethernet as well---the de-facto standard Layer 2 technology in IT networks. Consequently, TSN transforms OT networks in a similar fashion as Software-defined Network (SDN) has evolved IT networks. However, the technology itself is not sufficient to drive this transformation. An inherent part of OT networks is the ability to fulfill strict real-time requirements of communication streams. To this end, these real-time requirements must be well understood and translated into according configurations for TSN to facilitate the merging of OT and IT networks into so-called IT/OT converged networks. In this talk, we start with the OT traffic requirements and derive an architecture for IT/OT converged industrial networks.