The real-time performance of an industrial control system is very important, especially when covering applications like motion control, CNC or robotics. Other applications require also a good real-time behavior, for redundancy systems for example.
There are many factors that can influence the realtime of a device like the CPU, the OS and its configuration, applications and communication stacks.
Moreover, the real-time performance of Ethernet based field buses is also an important topic. Here again, many factors can generate jitter on the communication.

In order to be able to test and monitor the real-time performance of the control system and its Ethernet based communication, we have developed a test environment allowing the manufacturer to test the real-time behavior of his controller during the development. The product consists of a CODESYS application as an extensible framework and a series of test scripts to monitor the performance under different conditions. In order to measure this jitter, we use an external piece of hardware (TI- AM3359ICE2) for which we wrote the firmware. With this environment, we are able to measure the task jitter, the transmission jitter and the round trip.
For Linux based controllers, the cyclictest can also be executed in this environment.

The result of this development is a product owned by BE.services that is used internally to provide such tests during our projects, or on demand for a specific device.
Thanks to the results, we also provide consulting and services to optimize the real-time performance of our clients’ products.

This product is available for sale for manufacturers of industrial Control Systems. Please contact us. info@be-services.com