Communications plays a vital role in most industrial automation solutions and Rockwell Automation's Integrated Architecture offers a variety of options.
Rockwell communication technologies can be categorized by the primary network technologies (those that are actively used in modern implementations of a Logix system) and legacy network technologies (those that have been used frequently in the past but are not installed on the new Logix control systems).
In the next section, we will introduce some of the primary network technologies we see today in Rockwell Automation-based networks.
Primary network technologies
Logix relies on the following three primary technologies for network communication:
- DeviceNet
- ControlNet
- EtherNet/IP
DeviceNet and ControlNet were developed by Rockwell Automation and are based on the Common Industrial...