Big wigs join together for Industry 4.0

Belden and other big companies in the international electric and automation industries have come together in a new working group to realise the vision of Industry 4.0.

Since 2009, Belden has been involved in the IEEE 802.1 working group task force for time-sensitive networks (TSN), towards the standardisation of a networking solution for applications with high real-time requirements.

Now a new working group has been formed to combine TSN with the open OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA) specifications, which is anticipated will enable the Industry 4.0 vision of a high-performance, real-time-capable network to be realised without any vendor-specific technology.

It is hoped this will also significantly reduce the cost of ownership of networking sophisticated Industry 4.0 installations.

Others involved in the working group include Bosch Rexroth, General Electric, Kuka, Schneider Electric and National Instruments.

Dr Oliver Kleineberg, advance development manager for Belden’s Hirschmann brand, said that all of Belden's network devices use standardised technologies, since they offer users maximum flexibility, cost-effectiveness and are futureproof.

“This is why Belden has been supporting the development of TSN standards from the very beginning,” Kleineberg said.

“Unlike proprietary solutions, this open real-time technology does not require any cost-intensive technology-specific chips.”

Kleineberg expects this to generate a growing market acceptance and extend the spread of standards-based, real-time Ethernet, which he considers a prerequisite for implementing the sophisticated Industry 4.0 applications.

However, the TSN specification — which is expected to be published between 2016 and 2018 in the form of various IEEE 802.1 specifications — standardises only the communication on Layer 2 and, together with Ethernet transceivers, the underlying physical layer.

Since OPC UA is already available as an international specification for higher protocol layers that are primarily used for machine to machine communication, the OPC working group now intends to combine this with TSN.

“This will result in an open architecture that can be used to fully network even the most demanding production processes,” said Kleineberg.

Such processes include modular Industry 4.0 production lines, which have to meet high real-time requirements, either for reasons of safety or to maintain extremely fast control cycles, and which also have varying layouts depending on the order situation.

“OPC UA plus TSN can not only be used to enable the configuration of the participating machinery, but also to guarantee the necessary low end-to-end delay in direct machine-to-machine communication in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT),” he added.

This standardised communication solution is believed to be an important step on the path to converting production processes from a rigid, centralised approach into one that is dynamic and decentralised.

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