Made possible by: Field-level communication with OPC UA over TSN
Starting position
A machine consists of a central controller for the drive technology with several subordinate cascaded CAN networks. Two CAN master plug-in cards and up to 30 CAN hubs are required to control the total of 1,000 CAN drives.
Problem
- Network size and complexity: Long downtimes in the event of fault, changeover or maintenance
- Low bandwidth (10 Mbit/s): Tedious updating all devices in the network
- Alarm and diagnostics systems must be maintained separately
- No historical record of selected data points
Solution
Switch to an OPC UA over TSN network. End-to-end use of an Ethernet-based physical layer, together with OPC UA over TSN, allows flatter, simpler network topologies. An alarm system is available with OPC UA alarms and conditions.
Advantages
- Reduced cabling
- Improved scaling of machine variants
- Cost savings
- Faster changeover and maintenance
- Easy alarm management
- Fast troubleshooting and root cause analysis with OPC UA historizing