Industrial Ethernet
Customized to meet digital industry requirements
Siemens’ industrial communication relies on Industrial Ethernet and comprises everything that you need to realize highly efficient industrial networks and bus systems: powerful, future-proof network components for reliable use in harsh industrial environments, a cabling system for high-speed assembly on site, a high degree of redundancy for failure safety, and an alarm concept for continuous monitoring of network components, plus communication on the field level and flexible vertical integration all the way to the cloud – in short, a complete offering for implementing convergent OT/IT networks.
Fit for digitalization – from OT to IT
The greatest challenges in industrial automation have to do with smooth and efficient digitalization so that it’s possible to optimize plant performance by taking full advantage of the benefits of edge and cloud-based applications. Whereas OT and IT have traditionally been developed and operated independently of one another, they’re now increasingly converging. Today, the task is to interconnect the field and control levels all the way to the cloud while benefiting from the strengths of existing solutions and creating new synergies. Siemens makes this possible by combining two proven standards: PROFINET for speed and reliability and OPC UA for flexibility and data semantics.PROFINET and OPC UA. Two standards. One network.
To implement the consistent, end-to-end digitalization of OT and IT and make optimal use of OT and IT data, Siemens combines the benefits of two Ethernet standards: PROFINET and OPC UA. Both standards excel in their particular area of application in terms of high performance and ideally complement one another in a shared Industrial Ethernet network.
At the field level, PROFINET is impressive with its strict real-time capability for faster and faster applications, as well as deterministics and a large bandwidth for rapidly increasing numbers of signals and promoting the modularization of plants.
The strengths of OPC UA are apparent from the control level upwards – for semantic communication from machine to machine and from machine to the MES and ERP levels, or to the cloud, such as MindSphere. In the process, OPC UA transforms primarily noncontextual process and diagnostic data into intelligent, structured information. This opens up brand-new possibilities for analysis and process optimization and support the modularization of plants.
TSN – towards a real-time future
TSN (Time-Sensitive Networking) offers an additional functional expansion. This global Ethernet-standard supplements PROFINET and OPC UA with important real-time functions like reserved bandwidths, Quality of Service (QoS) mechanisms, and low transmission latency. At the field level, the combination of TSN and PROFINET enables isochronous applications that are fully IEEE-compliant. And thanks to plug & work support from TSN, even modular machines and machine modules added during runtime are made possible in the network.
