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.

The time until a new technology is established, its finer points are clarified, and users accept it is usually suspenseful, sometimes nerve-racking, and always exciting. That’s how it’s been for the IO-Link community for the past decade, but now IO-Link has arrived on the market and is being used across the globe.

Many PI experts are active in national and international standardization organizations and have taken on strategically important management functions there. Two exemplary areas include the integration of TSN into PROFINET and the specification of semantic identifiers for device description.

In the process industry, and in automation technology in particular, digitalization is currently a hot topic where the goal is to be able to respond to plant and market events quicker and more effectively than before. This article sets the technological basis for digitalization in the process industry.