CICS - SF research project

The CICS project, entitled „Potential, structure and interfaces of cloud-based industrial control services“, was launched in October 2014. The partners were the Düsseldorf Telelabor, an institution of the Competence Centre Automation Düsseldorf (CCAD), and the Chair of Communication Systems at the University of Augsburg in collaboration with the Fraunhofer ESK in Munich. The project was supported by Software Factory and other companies in the automation industry. The research project was funded by the BMWi via the Research Association for Electrical Engineering at ZVEI e.V.

The aim of CICS was to research a reference architecture based on web technologies that is suitable for implementing industrial control programmes in the form of control services (in accordance with the IEC 61131 standard). This also includes fast, reliable and secure process data interfaces (WebConnector) using the web protocols HTTP2, Web Socket and WebRTC. The control services utilise available public and/or private cloud structures for the management and execution of CICS. As a supplementary variant, the execution of the control services on web clients (web browsers) is also planned.

Among other things, the research results now enable the development of new, fully web-orientated control systems that can be adapted to application-specific requirements extremely flexibly and with little effort.