Methodology for the Combined Orchestration of Real-Time Containers and Time-Sensitive Network

The core concept of Software-defined Manufacturing involves the separation of software and hardware. Functionalities are not predefined but can be added later through software changes. This necessitates a suitable software and hardware architecture, which allows for reconfiguration of control software, i.e., the dynamic orchestration of real-time software. Traditional orchestration tools from the realm of non-real-time computing lack real-time support and do not provide means to configure real-time communication channels such as Time-Sensitive Networking. Thus, this work describes an orchestration tool based on Kubernetes, which is capable of orchestrating real-time containers including the necessary communication interfaces required for TSN.