configured in the automation engineering environment and are able to be diagnosed by the automation controller and HMI. 
 
One of the keys for many industrial operations is the need for determinism. In factories, messages that start or stop operations have to arrive on time. Delays of just a few milliseconds can destroy entire production runs or injure workers. This is an aspect of the industrial environment that does not exist in offices where there is rarely an impact if an e-mail arrives a few seconds late.

Gain the benefit of real-time communications.
Over the past few years, many different Ethernet protocols have emerged to address the factory’s need for precise timing.  These protocols provide determinism without impacting compatibility with existing data transfer.  This means that real-time communications can connect a controller and a servo drive on the same Ethernet network that sends database records to the MES.  The real-time protocol guarantees that the drive data is delivered from the controller on time with higher priority than transferring the record to the database.  Since this is a property of the protocol itself, the user does not have to worry about special programming for deterministic data. 

Gaining all these benefits does not require a lot of effort.  Ethernet is well proven in the industrial field. The ARC Advisory Group pegged the market at 1 million nodes in 2007, forecasting an increase to over 3 million nodes by 2012.  The size of the market underscores the availability of components, systems and installation expertise.

Adding all these factors together has led many management teams to the same conclusion: Ethernet offers a low cost, high bandwidth, standard network infrastructure that greatly simplifies connectivity, ease of installation, and maintenance while still meeting the performance needs of the automation environment.  Integrating this network infrastructure into factory floor automation offers solutions that can greatly increase productivity in ways that were not possible before.

Written by Eric Kaczor, Product Marketing Manager, Siemens Energy & Automation, Inc.