Industrial Ethernet is very rapidly becoming a reliable technology in automation applications. The reasons for this are flexibility, expandability, reliability, resilience, standard protocols, ability to adopt legacy protocols, ease of troubleshooting and maintenance.
When most plants implement Ethernet for the first time correct planning and future vision are not always kept in mind with regards to IP structures expansion projects etc. With Ethernet and careful design methods H3iSquared, with the use of Ruggedcom products, are able to assist many clients requiring on-the-fly expansions, topology changes and IP configuration with minimal downtime.
For example, the company was requested to assist one of its blue chip clients to change the IP addresses of a number of PLCs, imposing the least amount of downtime on production processes.
Development of the implementation concept was done in conjunction with Canadian-based Ruggedcom. Once this had been completed H3i implemented a solution using the Ruggedcom RX100 industrial grade router (RX1000) and a combination of routing, network address translation (NAT) and masquerading to implement the requirements.
An Industrial Ethernet automation system requires a more resilient network than a typical office network. By adding managed switches into the architecture users can design networks to be redundant in the case of link/device failure. For this a strong mesh topology would be required with recovery time of less than 5 ms per hop per switch. This will ensure information already streamed will not be lost. The IEEE has spanning tree and rapid spanning tree protocols for this type of mesh redundancy feature but recovery times prove to be too slow – seconds as opposed to milliseconds.
Ruggedcom released enhanced rapid spanning tree (eRSTP) which, according to the company, has far surpassed the former STP and RSTP recovery times. Ruggedcom’s eRSTP is also backward compatible to STP/RSTP for systems that require growth without the burden of replacing 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 that should be of benefit to any size infrastructure.
The RuggedNMS (network management station) depicts the current status of the network at screen login with regards to device uptime/downtime, service availability and device management configuration changes.
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