Pipelining for cyclic control systems
Arquimedes Canedo, Livio Dalloro, Hartmut Ludwig · 2013
This paper presents a novel pipelining technique designed specifically to improve the execution of cyclic control systems and applications in terms of scan cycle time reduction and/or execution of additional workload. Based on the observation that cyclic control systems are tightly coupled with physical processes and that state information (e.g. on/off signals, temperature, pressure) is the most critical data in an application, we present new execution schemes that overlap the execution of multiple cycles in multi-core processors over time. Using an edge detection application benchmark and a software real-time PLC (Programmable Logic Controller) implementation on a quad-core processor, we validate our pipelining method and show the performance scalability of the various schemes. Additionally, we analyze the resilience of our pipelining approach to time delays and propose a speculative execution method to deal with data dependency violations.