By the end of 2017, there were more than 8 million registered IO-Link nodes and the number is anticipated to grow rapidly in the forthcoming years. This is why the IO-Link Community has been systematically engaged with functionally safe communication.

It is interesting how Hype Topics evolve, and how some of them then vanish shortly afterward. Looking towards functional safety, it turns out that this is not to be considered a hype topic as such, but as a key ingredient for successful automation solutions.

Another three years have passed by since the last Achema already! PI aroused the interest of many visitors with a large multi-vendor 2-wire Ethernet (APL) demonstrator and the release of its PA Profile 4.0 for PROFINET documentation.

Closed fieldbuses simply don’t cut it anymore to run a modern manufacturing plant. Sure, they achieve the necessary performance, but at the expense of flexibility. Now that Ethernet is becoming deterministic by design, performance is no longer the deciding factor: it’s all about the data.

PROFINET is increasingly evolving into a pillar for automation concepts of the future. A new version of the PA application profile (PA Profile V4.0) is an important step toward making PROFINET suitable for use in process automation equipment of the Industry 4.0 generation.

From June 4 - 7, 2018 the annual PICC/PITC/PITL Meeting took place in the Netherlands. More than 70 representativesof the PI Competence Centers, Trainings Centers and Test Laboratories held various meetings in The Hague.

At Hannover Fair 2018, PI exhibited its first working demonstration of [email protected] Of note is the Plug-&-Work capability. This feature allows devices to be added and removed from the TSN domain without the need for a dedicated centralized network manager.