Abstract
Hybrid fieldbus network integrating wireless networks with existing wired fieldbuses has become new a research direction in industrial automation systems. In comparison to wired fieldbuses, the hybrid wired/wireless fieldbus network has a different system architecture, data transmission mechanism, communication protocol, etc. This leads to different challenges that need to be addressed. This paper proposes a hybrid wired/wireless fieldbus network which consists of a wireless industrial control network (WICN), a wired PROFIBUS-DP (Process Field Bus-Decentralized Periphery) fieldbus network, and a wired MODBUS/TCP (Mod Bus/Transmission Control Protocol) fieldbus network. They are connected by a new gateway which uses a shared data model to solve data exchange in different network protocols. In this paper, we describe the architecture of the proposed hybrid wired/wireless fieldbus network and data transmission mechanisms in detail, and then evaluate the performance of hybrid fieldbus network via a set of experiments. The experiment results confirm that the proposed hybrid wired/wireless fieldbus network can satisfy the performance requirement of industrial network control systems. Furthermore, in order to further investigate feasibility of the proposed hybrid wired/wireless fieldbus network, it is deployed at a steam turbine power generation system, and the performance figures obtained further verify its feasibility and effectiveness.
Highlights
Industry 4.0 has become a hot topic that is attracting growing interest from governments, manufacturers, researchers, and developers
In order to further investigate feasibility of the proposed hybrid wired/wireless fieldbus network, it is applied to an experimental measurement and control platform of a steam turbine power generation system, which is composed of a gateway, a wired PROFIBUS-DP sub-network, a wired
Since the network protocols are different in various sub-networks, they employ a shared data model to address data exchange in different network protocols
Summary
Industry 4.0 has become a hot topic that is attracting growing interest from governments, manufacturers, researchers, and developers. The main work of this paper is to design a new gateway to construct a hybrid wired/wireless fieldbus network It consists of a wired PROFIBUS-DP fieldbus network, a wired MODBUS/TCP fieldbus network and a wireless industrial control network, which are connected by the gateway as an intermediate station to implement data exchange in different network protocols. The advantage of this hybrid fieldbus network is to reduce the cost of cable deployment and insure the network performance in current complex industrial environments. This section first gives a brief introduction on several well-known wired and wireless fieldbus networks including PROFIBUS-DP, MODBUS/TCP and WICN (Section 2.1), and reviews related works on hybrid wired/wireless fieldbus networks (Section 2.2), and describes the architecture of the proposed hybrid wired/wireless network (Section 2.3)
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