The goal of APL is to bring Ethernet down to field level instruments in hazardous areas. Nowadays, existing field devices typically rely on limited fieldbus network infrastructures. The development of a two-wire-based advanced physical layer (APL) for Ethernet is running at full steam.
The theme for this month's issue is clear: the usefulness in employing both PROFINET and OPC UA. Existing use-cases (e.g. predictive maintenance) become easier to achieve, and new use-cases (e.g. C2C Safety) are created through the powerful combination of these two complementary technologies. Thank you for reading and enjoy!
Mapping PROFINET data to the OPC UA information model has been one of the main tasks of PROFIBUS & PROFINET International for the past few months. The many use-cases discovered show that the effort spent collaborating on a Companion Specification with the OPC Foundation will be beneficial across the Industry 4.0 landscape.
At the Hannover Messe 2019 and the PI Konferenz, PI was able to provide customers and members with PROFINET updates on the integration of TSN, vertical and horizontal integration using OPC UA, and our security concept.
The 2018 PI technologies node count indicates a stongly positive trend in broad acceptance and implementation. IO-Link and PROFIsafe pass a milestone and PROFINET reaches 26 million devices.
Progress towards PROFINET@ TSN continues...The concept and the first step of implementation for a PROFINET with TSN certification were presented at Hannover Messe 2019.
The rash of new technologies confronting users today is becoming more complex. PI has to assess which technological developments are important for communication and which aren’t. This also leads to closer cooperation with the OPC Foundation, eCl@ss, FDI, AIDA, and NAMUR, for example.
Safety over OPC UA based on PROFIsafe: one year ago, the OPC Foundation and PI issued a memorandum of understanding for this joint concept. The specification will now soon be published and is available for OPC UA-based controller-controller communication.
