  Industry 4.0 is changing fundamentally the way data is collected, stored and
analyzed in industrial processes. While this change enables novel application
such as flexible manufacturing of highly customized products, the real-time
control of these processes, however, has not yet realized its full potential.
We believe that modern virtualization techniques, specifically application
containers, present a unique opportunity to decouple control functionality from
associated hardware. Through it, we can fully realize the potential for highly
distributed and transferable industrial processes even with real-time
constraints arising from time-critical sub-processes. In this paper, we present
a specifically developed orchestration tool to manage the challenges and
opportunities of shifting industrial control software from dedicated hardware
to bare-metal servers or (edge) cloud computing platforms. Using off-the-shelf
technology, the proposed tool can manage the execution of containerized
applications on shared resources without compromising hard real-time execution
determinism. Through first experimental results, we confirm the viability and
analyzed the behavior of resource shared systems with strict real-time
requirements. We then describe experiments set out to deliver expected results
and gather performance, application scope and limits of the presented approach.
