wilamowski-b-m-irwin-j-d-industrial-communication-systems-2011

Preambles
xxi
the market. To name a few of the candidates presented in the following chapters (Chapters 48 through 55),
ZigBee, 6LoWPAN, and WirelessHart are some of the wireless technologies that are capable of replacing
many wired fieldbus applications. These technologies allow for added flexibility by placing nodes freely on
moving machines and by reducing the installation effort. All wireless networks have to specifically address
the issue of security and power consumption for nodes that are battery powered.
Group 3.7: Industrial Internet
The application of Internet- and IT-based protocols and technologies is undoubtedly a promising and
up-to-date development (Chapters 56 through 59). Besides acceptance by the users, the adoption of
existing, proven technologies in the automation domain reduces efforts by reusing existing concepts,
functions, and software components. However, different time frames in technology development
cycles—compared to the rather long-term application in industry—are critical issues in the selection of
appropriate technologies. The technologies described in Chapter 55 address different application areas
and thus use different technologies. Starting with function blocks concepts according to IEC 61499, a
generic, function-related approach is described. The concepts allow a network-independent synthesis
of application functions, which is a prerequisite for distributed industrial applications. The application
of typical IT protocols and system structures can be investigated perfectly in Industrial Internet, and
the adoption, specialization, and application of protocols from the Internet is a global trend. Originally
developed together with software companies, including Microsoft, OPC has become the de facto standard
for providing access from higher-level applications to automation applications. With OPC UA,
major enhancements in this technology have been made, including support for Web services and complex
information models. Web technology and the Industrial Internet have enabled the application of
multimedia technologies as integral parts of automation systems. Advances in machine vision document
this fact. Finally, energy production and distribution are important tasks supported by various
technologies. These technologies use Ethernet as one of the underlying protocols and thus their development
follows that of IT systems in general.
Preamble to Part IV: Internet Programming
J. David Irwin and Bogdan M. Wilamowski
Auburn University
Auburn, Alabama
The rapidly growing Internet is also expanding into the industrial environment. Many of the protocols,
techniques, and hardware developed for the public Internet can also be used in closed industrial networks,
while enjoying the benefits of reduced component cost due to their mass production. There is also
the possibility of using the Internet to watch, supervise, and control industrial environments remotely
from any place in the world, assuming that a proper security cover is provided. This part introduces
two commonly used Internet protocols, TCP and UDP, and illustrates typical API interfaces and their
sample use in simple proof-of-concept client–server applications. Both protocols belong to transport
layer protocols and use an underlying IP network layer and a communication media–specific data link
layer. UDP is a packet-based connectionless protocol with little overhead for unicast, multicast, and
broadcast communication (Chapter 60), while the TCP protocol provides reliable, best-effort delivery of
data streams (Chapter 61). The development of interactive Web sites can be done in many languages, the
most common being HTML, Javascript, PHP, PERL, and Python. It is of course possible to develop such
Web sites using general languages such as Java or C++, but specialized languages are usually preferred.
This part shows how interactive Web sites can be programmed using PHP (Chapter 62), Python (Chapter
63), and PERL (Chapter 64). Chapter 65 describes how to run remote applications over the Internet.
© 2011 by Taylor and Francis Group, LLC