One of the reasons - apart from pigheadedness - for the continuing existence of traditional fieldbuses is the lack of determinism in ethernet networking. Even industrial variants rarely show the reliability required by extremely timing-critical systems. There are ways to overcome this, e.g. by tweaking networking protocols and fine-tuning software. A wholly deterministic and specialized operating system could do the trick as well.
It's a phenomenon: While most fieldbuses have more or less vanished, Profibus is not only still around but seems to have become stronger over the past decade with its range of application continually increasing. Thus, the demand for information continues to be high. A 'slide set' is supposed to convey detailed know-how.
While industrial automation in general has just made the move towards ccompany-independent standards, new concepts like cloud computing seem to be almost too revolutionary for this industry. As a consequence, equipment providers tread softly and integrate new technology with caution. Why not hide a cloud in an M2M-Platform?
While IEEE 802.11n has been adopted and established quite rapidly in consumer products and PC systems and the next, even faster standard is about to come soon, industrial automation lags behind a bit. Now, the practical problems of security and safety have been solved and corresponding products are ready for deployment.
CAN is a rapidly evolving bus standard, many changes reflect rising security and safety concerns as well as user-friendly configuration issues. Often it is the case that various subsystems of a larger system comply to different standard levels. This makes using a single deelopment tool rather difficult.
Various players from the field communication area have joined their efforts and intend to co-sponsor the second annual Field Communication Lounge exhibit at two of the world’s largest automation trade shows.
Today, control units for industrial automation need to be modular in order to keep cost and integration effort at a reasonable level. Since many of those applications require components (i.e software and hardware) from different vendors, certification and licensing issues arise. Bundles or system platforms may ease those pains.
A manufacturer’s declaration is asked by the IO-Link Consortium for all IO-Link Masters and Devices in order to get IO-Link conformity. Therefore, test equipment is neccessary which allows checking all relevant parameters. A major part is EMC conformity.
In industrial systems, machines need to be monitored constantly in order to ensure material stability, system security and personnel safety. The Field Device Technology standard (FDT) takes care of vendor-independent parameterization.
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