be IT people, but they want to own their systems. We teach a variety of other subjects, including IP addressing/DHCP, and also spend time on switches. The control-level folks need to understand switches, how they operate, what they can do and how they can use them.”

Jeff Owens, a Dallas-based consultant specializing in industrial control system design and programming, went through the class. He was one of the folks who felt the need to know more about the network that was impacting his domain. He describes himself as increasingly involved with networking concerns.

“Over the years,” says Owens, “I’ve been from ‘Ethernet is not suitable for a control network,’ to ‘The Ethernet control network should be completely separate from the business network,’ to ‘Boy, it sure is great when we can share all this control data right over the network!’ I’d thought that Ethernet was fine for HMI (human-machine interface), but not for much else in the control environment because it’s non-deterministic. My thinking shifted when 100 Mbps (megabits per second) Ethernet became more available and switches became cheaper. Technically, Ethernet is still not deterministic, but throughput is so fast that

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Manufacturing On the Move

“With two network cards in the PC, one to the controller or test stand, the other to the office network, you can tie that controller right into the office network. Along with passing data upward, we’re also tying in some of the office applications so we can take the data and interface it pretty easily into the controller. This is pretty new, but it makes sense to give the engineer direct access to some of this data.”

Tuned in?

The emerging field of wireless networking is also promising to give engineers and other manufacturing professionals real-time access to an expanded range of data. As Hesh Kagan, director of new ventures at automation vendor Invensys Process Systems, Foxboro, Mass., notes, “The radio spectrum immersing every enterprise is a communications asset to be exploited. The good news is that the emergence of secure, affordable wireless technology is making it easier to do that every day.” Unlike traditional networks, however, where control-level personnel are taking greater control, wireless networks remain a top-down affair.

Kagan adds that Invensys, in conjunction with its partner Apprion, of Moffett Field, Calif., is working to meet those challenges by developing a unified systems model that can accommodate multiple wireless technology vendors.

For more information, search keyword “Ethernet” at www.automationworld.com.