Automation systems have always been designed to meet two key criteria: reliability and availability. Reliability is the first priority- data that enters the network should pass through it unchanged and should always make it to its destination. But availability is a more complex problem because it’s not just about moving bits across a network once they’re transmitted. Instead, availability means […]
System redundancy for PROFINET comes with some strange terminology: S1, S2, R1, and R2 all show up in technical and marketing literature. They’re usually presented without much context, so we’ll clarify them here. System redundancy relies on the concept of multiple connections to a device or controller to maintain the system in the event of a failure. In our article […]
The redundant title of this article is your first clue to the topic of this article: PROFINET media redundancy. PROFINET media redundancy is optional with all conformance classes, but in some applications, it is critical for correct operation (for example, hot backup in a safety application). PROFINET offers network media redundancy through a ring topology. PROFINET has two main media […]
The Media Redundancy Protocol (MRP) is something we’ve covered before, but we haven’t touched on the Automanager yet. It’s an entity that was introduced in the 2016 version of the MRP specification (IEC 62439-2-2016), and it helps make a MRP ring even more fault-tolerant. Making Media Redundancy… More Redundant MRP originally had two entities: a Client and a Manager. Clients […]
PROFINET implements redundancy in multiple ways to tolerate multiple types of failures. A PROFINET system can be designed to tolerate a failure of a device, a controller, or even the media that connects them within a network. But there’s another component of a PROFINET system that can fail: the network itself. Availability in the worst-case scenario Network redundancy is a […]
The concept of redundancy in PROFINET is broken into several parts: device, network, media, and controller redundancy. This article takes a look at controller redundancy and why it’s more complex than device redundancy. There are two moving parts that make Controller redundancy work: coordination between controllers (usually some vendor-specific communication between PLC applications) and how devices handle simultaneous connections (a […]
It’s three A.M. Third shift is in full swing when a distributed I/O rack decides to stop working. But instead of stopping the line, the system seamlessly switches over to the redundant I/O rack and just logs a “maintenance requested” message with the operator. The maintenance crew doesn’t have to scramble, and the night continues without a hitch. That’s device […]
