Virtualization Applicability to Industrial Automation
Lappalainen, Ari Juhani (2016)
2016
Automaatiotekniikan koulutusohjelma
Teknisten tieteiden tiedekunta - Faculty of Engineering Sciences
This publication is copyrighted. You may download, display and print it for Your own personal use. Commercial use is prohibited.
Hyväksymispäivämäärä
2016-03-09
Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:tty-201601282261
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:tty-201601282261
Tiivistelmä
Industrial automation systems have strict requirements which differ a lot from the requirements of traditional information technology systems. How security is implemented differs as well between the systems. Many components in industrial automation systems were designed for isolated environments and as such they don’t have security features on them. These components are still being used in systems because of the long life time of the equipment in industrial automation systems. Because of these reasons, the technologies used in traditional information technology systems cannot be used in industrial automation systems without proper research and testing.
Traditionally different software components are executed each on their separate hardware. This is to provide isolation for software components. The isolation is needed to avoid the bugs and vulnerabilities in one software component from affecting other software components. Using separate hardware for each software component can be costly and hard to maintain. Virtualization is a technology which allows executing multiple software components on same hardware while simultaneously isolating them from each other. Virtualization also provides some advanced features like fault tolerance. These features could be useful in industrial automation systems as well. The problem is that most of the virtualization technologies and solutions are developed for traditional information technology environments. As such research is needed to see if these technol-ogies and solutions can be used for industrial automation.
In this thesis a literature review is done for the existing virtualization technologies and some virtualization solutions are compared with each other. Some existing literature of using virtualization in industrial automation is also reviewed. Based on the literature reviews and the virtualization solution comparisons, the virtualization applicability to industrial automation is evaluated.
The virtualization is found to be suitable to be used in industrial automation systems. However, proper selection of used hardware and virtualization solutions matters. As part of this thesis, a suggestion is made how a virtualized industrial automation system could be implemented. Virtualization adds new requirements for an industrial automation system and using virtualization affects all the steps in the system’s lifecycle model. As such virtualization should be taken into account from the beginning when designing an industrial automation system which uses virtualization.
Traditionally different software components are executed each on their separate hardware. This is to provide isolation for software components. The isolation is needed to avoid the bugs and vulnerabilities in one software component from affecting other software components. Using separate hardware for each software component can be costly and hard to maintain. Virtualization is a technology which allows executing multiple software components on same hardware while simultaneously isolating them from each other. Virtualization also provides some advanced features like fault tolerance. These features could be useful in industrial automation systems as well. The problem is that most of the virtualization technologies and solutions are developed for traditional information technology environments. As such research is needed to see if these technol-ogies and solutions can be used for industrial automation.
In this thesis a literature review is done for the existing virtualization technologies and some virtualization solutions are compared with each other. Some existing literature of using virtualization in industrial automation is also reviewed. Based on the literature reviews and the virtualization solution comparisons, the virtualization applicability to industrial automation is evaluated.
The virtualization is found to be suitable to be used in industrial automation systems. However, proper selection of used hardware and virtualization solutions matters. As part of this thesis, a suggestion is made how a virtualized industrial automation system could be implemented. Virtualization adds new requirements for an industrial automation system and using virtualization affects all the steps in the system’s lifecycle model. As such virtualization should be taken into account from the beginning when designing an industrial automation system which uses virtualization.