A diagnostics model for industrial communications networks

Over the past twenty years industrial communications networks have become common place in most industrial plants. The high availability of these networks is crucial in smooth plant operations. Therefore local and remote diagnostics of these networks is of primary importance in solving any existing or emerging network problems. Users for most part consider the “plant networks” as black boxes, and often not sure of the actual health of the networks. The major part of the work outlined in this research concentrates on the proposed “Network Diagnostics Model” for local and remote monitoring. The main objective of the research is to aid the establishment of tools and techniques for diagnosis of the industrial networks, with particular emphasis on PROFIBUS and PROFINET. Additionally this research has resulted in development of a number of devices to aid in network diagnostics. The work outlined in this submission contributes to the developments in the area of online diagnostics systems. The development work was conducted in the following phases: 1. Development of Function Block (FB) for diagnosing PROFIBUS network for implementation on PLC. 2. Development of OPC server for diagnosing PROFIBUS network for implementation on PC. 3. Development of a web based diagnostic software for multiple fieldbuses for implementation on imbedded XP platform. 4. Development of OPC server for diagnosing PROFINET network for implementation on PC 5. Conformance testing of masters (PLC) in PROFIBUS network to increase the health of the network. 6. Use of diagnostics tools for performance analysis of fieldbuses networks for high performance applications. The research work outlined in this submission has made a significant and coherent contribution to online diagnostics of fieldbus communications networks, and has paved the way for the introduction of the online diagnostics devices to the market place. It has shown that the proposed model provides a uniform framework for research and development of diagnostics tools and techniques for fieldbus networks. Organizations that use fieldbus should consider installing advanced online diagnostic systems to boost maintenance efficiency and reduce operating costs, and maintain the availability of plant resources. Based on the experience gained over a number of years a multilayer model is proposed for future development of diagnostics tools.