Industrial Ethernet has very rapidly become the reliable technology for Automation Communication within production plants, Utility Substations and ITS. Some of the reason for this rapid change is based on flexibility, expandability, reliability, resilience, open world standard protocols, ability to adopt legacy protocols, ease of troubleshooting and maintenance.
When most plants started with Ethernet, correct planning for future vision was not always kept in mind with regards to considerations of expansions of the plant/site, future implementation of IP Camera’s, VoIP, Fire Detection and many more peripherals. Such expansion would have impact on the original design for IP Structures and design layouts.
Ethernet caters for, with the use of intelligent managed switches and high performance routers, the ability to assist almost any clients’ requirements with regards to on the fly expansions, topology changes, breakdown support and IP Layout changes with MINIMAL Downtime!
The choice of equipment to use for the communication backbone in Automation Systems is critical. It is critical since failure of equipment or design will impact production!
Ruggedcom is the only switch in the world to offer ZERO PACKET LOSS TECHNOLOGY™. When your data cables are running in a high EMI (Electro Magnetic Interference) environment such as VSD’s (Variable Speed Drives) and high voltage and current in electrical cables, interference will likely deteriorate your critical communication data streams. With Ruggedcom patented ZERO PACKET LOSS TECHNOLOGY™ this is no more a concern! Ruggedcom can withstand temperatures up to +85ºC, handle harsh vibration, and work in the worst of environments.
Application Note:
It was requested for H3iSquared to assist a Blue Chip Client to change IP Addresses of their PLC’s on their Automation system with imposing the least amount of downtime to the production process.
H3iSquared completed development of the implementation concept with Ruggedcom, based in Toronto, Canada. With the completed development, the solution was depicted using the Ruggedcom Industrial Grade Router (RX1000), ROS(Rugged Operating System), Routing, NAT(Network Address Translation) and Masquerading. Expectation were far surpassed when the recovery after the changes and implementation to the network allowed the PLC to regain communication well within the allocated time slots of only seconds.
An Industrial Ethernet Automation System requires a more resilient Network than a typical office network. With adding the use of managed switches into the Architecture you can design your mission critical network to be redundant in case of Link/Device Failure. For this instance a Strong Mesh Topology would be required with Recovery Time of less than 5ms per hop per switch. This will ensure information already streamed down the network will not be lost upon the even of a link failure on the Data Streams path. The IEEE has Spanning Tree and Rapid Spanning Tree Protocols for this type of Mesh Redundancy feature but recovery times prove to be to slow since recovery times are in seconds as apposed to milliseconds. Ruggedcom found a solution! Ruggedcom released Enhanced Rapid Spanning Tree (eRSTP™) which has far surpassed the former STP and RSTP with recovery times and in terms of the size of the network that can be catered for with still recovering in time from a failure that will not effect production or PLC/Scada communication. Ruggedcom’s eRSTP™ is also backward compatible to STP/RSTP for system that require more growth without the burden of cost by replacing their existing hardware.
Once the network has a strong topology layout design and is configured and running optimally, the next step is to introduce a Network Management System.
The Rugged Network Management Station is a good example of features which should be of benefit to any size infrastructure.
The RuggedNMS (Network Management Station) is in aid of being proactive rather than reactive by means of depicting the current status of the network at screen login with regards to Device Uptime/Downtime, Service availability, Device Management Configuration Changes (With options to roll back firmware options as well as the older configurations)
Call H3iSquared now for any Ethernet advice!