Integration of openSAFETY in OMNeT++

Functional safety protocols provide automatic protection against system failures. Safety will be of critical importance for future industrial systems since they are undergoing automation and digital transformation under the Industry 4.0 revolution. However, functional safety depends on the underlying communication system employed in the manufacturing area. An extensive evaluation of the communication system and the functional safety protocol is needed before deploying it to the production environment. To facilitate the evaluation process of a fail-safe communication protocol, we integrate openSAFETY in the OMNeT++ simulation framework. We validate its integration by comparing the simulation results with an existing experimental work where the results show similar trends. Furthermore, we simulate an industrial closed-loop control use case with IEEE 802.11n being the communication technology. The results obtained in terms of safe-state duration and packet error rate demonstrate that 802.11n with its default configuration is not suitable for a highly demanding industrial application.