Regional PI Associations (RPAs) from around the world gathered for their annual meeting in Sydney Australia and stayed to support PI Australia’s PROFIBUS & PROFINET Global Forum and Automation Innovation Summit.

The only path to functioning networks in the context of Industrie 4.0 is by way of standards. They ensure a smooth information flow within the production process. That is why PI works closely with other organizations to advance usable and reliable solutions. This is illustrated by Peter Wenzel, Executive Director of PI Germany, with three examples from the past year.

The Hannover Fair is the largest industrial trade show. Each year a partner country is featured with this year’s partner being the USA. Not surprisingly, attendance from the USA reached an all-time high at 5,000 out of the 190,000 attendees. PI had its own booth on the red carpet tour route.

The annual determination of the installed base of PI technologies show a significant growth in market acceptance. The numbers for PROFINET and PROFIsafe are particularly strong. IO-Link is also exhibiting a strongly accelerated growth.

Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) is expected to be the next big advancement in standard Ethernet. This set of standards will allow deterministic performance as part of IEEE-standard Ethernet. Some of the standards will not be finalized for quite some time, but PI has begun a Working Group to determine how best to leverage TSN in PROFINET. Note that PROFINET already provides deterministic, high-speed performance, but as TSN starts to appear as part of the Ethernet infrastructure, PROFINET will use it. Initial results from the working group are expected in November.

If you do nothing else, read this! Can't make it to one of the hundreds of PROFIBUS or PROFINET training events going on around the world? Need a point of reference at the tip of your fingers? Many new documents are available, some with important updates.

Are new technologies needed for implementation of Industry 4.0? Not necessarily. Rather, it is a matter of toughening up existing technologies so that they can meet future requirements. Profinet is already well-prepared for this because of the important groundwork laid by PI (PI (PROFIBUS & PROFINET International).