FPGA-Implemented Human–Machine Interface with Real-Time Industrial Communication Protocol Support

Abstract

The Human-Machine Interfaces (HMIs) are important to an industrial automation system as they allow an operator to monitor and control machines in real time. As industrial processes become increasingly complex and smart manufacturing environments start to arise, the need to communicate with industrial controllers more often with deterministic communication, low latency, and reliable interaction is increasing. Traditional microcontroller-based HMI systems have been found to be limited in processing speed, communication latency, and deterministic task scheduling, which may be undetermined in high-demand industry performance of the real-time in this case. A potential solution to such issues has been presented in this study a FPGA based HMI architecture that could be used in any industrial application based on real time communication protocols and still guarantee a deterministic response of the system. The proposed system incorporates a real-time task scheduling method at the hardware level based on Rate Monotonic Scheduling (RMS) and Earliest Deadline First (EDF) algorithms to effectively prioritise the concurrent activity of processing a user input, screen-updating, and handling of communicated packets from other tasks. It also has architecture support to popular industrial communication protocols, such as those of the Modbus TCP, and CAN bus, and EtherCAT, allowing a hassle-free interaction with programmable logic controllers and industrial devices. The implementation is modelled in FPGA and benefits of the parallel processing and hardware-level protocol processing are used to attain lower communication latency, better throughput, and resource optimization. The experimental test shows that the suggested system has shorter reaction time and better communication efficiency than the traditional embedded HMI systems. The findings suggest the possibility of implementing the FPGA-based HMI platform in the current industrial automation systems, especially under prerequisites of smart manufacturing settings that need the availability of the real-time performance and communication infrastructure, which can be easily scaled.