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Preambles
are the same. Communication in an industrial environment normally has to be highly reliable, and
often has to fulfill special demands in terms of delay, bandwidth, or integrity. This fact, also referred
to as quality of service, is therefore revisited in the following group of chapters (Chapters 19 through 23)
from the viewpoint of industrial communication, which ranges from real time over safety and security
to network-based control. The discussion centers around the manner in which these systems have
to be designed in order to fulfill the minimum requirements that guarantee the different properties
for these communication areas.
Preamble to Part II: application-Specific Areas
Peter Palensky
Energy Department
Austrian Institute of Technology
Vienna, Austria
Thomas Novak
SWARCO Futurit Verkehrssignalssysteme GmbH
Perchtoldsdorf, Austria
The plethora of applications for industrial communication systems (ICS) leads to a large variety of
technologies and standards. This part gives an overview of the important applications and their
specialties—and peculiarities—in ICS. The spectrum of topics ranges from embedded networks
in avionics to building and home automation to medical applications. The applications can differ
in a number of aspects that are important for designing or selecting an ICS technology, some of
which are
• Number of nodes
• Requested latency
• Requested bandwidth
• Real-time requirements
• Cost per node
• Reliability and availability
• Functional safety
• Electromagnetic compatibility
• Physical topology
• Length of network segments
• Scalability and extensibility
• Allowed physical media
• Network management
• Interoperability
• Information security
• Explosion protection
It is therefore no wonder that there is no “universal” network for everybody and everything, but a set of
specialized networks that are applicable to one area but probably not to another. Knowing the details
and differences of application-specific ICS helps to understand their strengths and weaknesses and
greatly helps in design decisions. There is an increasing trend that encompasses technological convergence
(runs everything over Ethernet) and semantic convergence (runs everything over Web services),
and the following chapters will explain why this has yet to be realized. There are reasons for this phenomenon,
and it is important to know them.
© 2011 by Taylor and Francis Group, LLC