Industrial Ethernet resource sharing ability

With the development of the Internet/Intranet, Ethernet has penetrated all corners. Users on the Internet have removed resources from geographical constraints and can browse industrial control site data on any computer on the Internet. "Control and management integration" is unmatched by any other kind of field bus.

The introduction of Ethernet will provide the possibility for the subsequent development of the control system. Users do not need to make independent research and investment in technical upgrading. For this, any existing fieldbus technology is unmatched. At the same time, the development of robotics and intelligent technologies require that communication networks have higher bandwidth and performance, and communication protocols have higher flexibility. These requirements can be well met by Ethernet.

Although Industrial Ethernet has been truly implemented in some industries, for other industries, Fieldbus and Industrial Ethernet will coexist for many years. Fieldbus and industrial Ethernet are two technologies commonly used in current industrial control applications. Although various fieldbus technologies are incompatible with each other, high-speed real-time data transmission cannot be realized between controllers of different companies, and there are problems such as "islands of automation" caused by the existence of a gap in the agreement of the information network. However, in the control network, problems such as the rapid recovery of network faults and intrinsic safety are still the major obstacles to the full application of Ethernet. Therefore, fieldbus technology is still widely used at the device layer, and industrial Ethernet applications are mainly concentrated between the manufacturing execution layer and the device layer. This will not only reduce the user's investment risk, but also protect the user's existing equipment and technology investment. It can be expected that the mixed state of fieldbus and industrial Ethernet will continue for a considerable period of time. However, it is certain that Ethernet has become an irreversible "presence" in the industrial scene. Judging from the current development of international and domestic industrial Ethernet technologies, industrial Ethernet has been widely used in the manufacturing execution layer and has become the de facto standard. In the future, industrial Ethernet will play an increasingly important role in the interconnection and information integration between field devices in industrial enterprise integrated automation systems.

Due to the difficulty of forming a unified standard, fieldbus technology has greatly affected its popularization and application. In addition, a single field bus obviously cannot complete complex information management functions, which makes its integration with information networks very natural. Traditional commercial Ethernet is the most widely used communication technology today and has many advantages. However, Ethernet is considered to be a "non-deterministic" network that does not meet real-time requirements and does not meet the harsh environment requirements of industrial sites. With the development of industrial Ethernet, the problems of communication determinism and real-time, stability and reliability, security, and bus power supply are being solved in industrial Ethernet. It is generally believed that industrial Ethernet is the best solution for controlling networks in the future and has broad development prospects. However, at present, Industrial Ethernet uses dedicated industrial Ethernet switches, communication modules and other expensive devices, which has caused the popularization and application of industrial Ethernet to be affected. Therefore, the field bus and industrial Ethernet mixed field bus as the subnet of Ethernet and Ethernet as the state of the upper network of the field bus is a more realistic solution. And it will continue for a long time.