Enforcing Network Safety-Margins in Industrial Process Control Using MACD Indicators

In the wake of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, process control systems deployed in factories and power plants must be able to exchange information between subsystems handling various aspects of the controlled process. To facilitate communication increasingly heterogeneous networks are used, leading to the problem of load spikes or bursts in bandwidth usage. This raises the question of how to adapt the traffic to ensure dependable communication for safety relevant functions of the process control. We examined the applicability of the Moving Average Convergence Divergence indicator, used in the financial sector for the detection of bandwidth bursts. Introducing a monitoring component, which calculates the MACD indicator and throttles the transmission of low-priority events, we are able to avoid congestion of the network. This paper shows our novel approach which allows for enforcing network safety-margins of distributed process control systems using a finance indicator as short term predictor of network traffic.