The industrial communication of the future

There are several enabling technologies for industrial automation – industrial protocols. As discussed earlier, protocols form the basis of standardization and are the language translators for various systems to seamlessly interact and exchange information. This section includes the core component of this chapter, connecting the physical layer of PLCs to the application layers in the cloud while focusing on advancing your Industry 4.0 implementation.

Industrial bus or Fieldbus protocols, as they are widely called, provide a digital communication link between control devices serving as a local area network. They offer important abilities such as installation flexibility, easy maintainability, and, most importantly, configurability. Real-time industrial ethernet is the base of most of the Fieldbus protocols today. Safety and production-grade readiness are pivotal requirements of an industrial environment. To satisfy both of them,...