Industrial Ethernet is very rapidly becoming the reliable technology for Automation Plants. The reason Ethernet is quickly becoming the standard means of communication is due to it’s flexibility, expandability, reliability, resilience, 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 such as IP Structures, expansion projects for the future and so on… With Ethernet and careful design methods H3iSquared, with the use of Ruggedcom products, are able to assist almost any clients requirements with regards to on the fly expansions, topology changes and IP Layout changes with MINIMAL Downtime!
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 and making use of the Ruggedcom Industrial Grade Router (RX1000), H3iSquared were able to find a solution making use of a combination of Routing, Network Address Translation (NAT) and Masquerading to implement the requirements with the least possible amount of down time.
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 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)