Voting System Bus Protocol for a Highly-Reliable PLC with Redundant Modules

An SPLC (Safety Programmable Logic Controller) must be designed to meet the highest safety standards, IEEE 1E, and should guarantee a level of fault-tolerance and high-reliability that ensures complete error-free operation. In order to satisfy these criteria, I/O modules, communication modules, processor modules and bus modules of the SPLC have been configured in triple or dual modular redundancy. The redundant modules receive the same data to determine the final data by the voting logic. Currently, the processor of each rx module performs the voting by deciding on the final data. It is the intent of this paper to prove the improvement on the current system, and develop a voting system for multiple data on a system bus level. The new system bus protocol is implemented based on a TCN-MVB that is a deterministic network consisting of a master-slave structure. The test result shows that the suggested system is better than the present system in view of its high utilization and improved performance of data exchange and voting.