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

13
Vertical Integration
Thilo Sauter
Austrian Academy
of Sciences
Stefan Soucek
Loytec electronics GmbH
Martin
Wollschlaeger
Dresden University
of Technology
13.1 Introduction..................................................................................... 13-1
13.2 Historical Background................................................................... 13-2
13.3 Network Interconnections.............................................................13-4
13.4 Application View............................................................................. 13-7
13.5 Security Aspects in Vertical Integration.....................................13-8
13.6 Trends in Vertical Integration..................................................... 13-10
Abbreviations............................................................................................. 13-11
References.................................................................................................. 13-12
13.1 Introduction
The past two decades have brought tremendous advances in network technology, both in the office world
and in all fields of automation. Two obvious indicators for this are on the one hand the stunning success
of the Internet, whose technological principles have also widely been adopted in small-size local area networks
(LANs). On the other hand, the lengthy and fierce struggle for an acceptable compromise in fieldbus
standardization shows that the automation domain is seen as an important market by the big players.
Consequently, as networking in both worlds has reached a mature point, the recent years have seen many
attempts to bring the two sides together and to finally achieve something that had remained wishful thinking
for a long time: the idea of vertical integration, meaning a seamless integration of automation data into
a higher level information technology (IT) context beyond mere data acquisition [WV03].
The term “vertical integration” has become trendy in the last years and has been used as a marketing
argument for a number of automation solutions. Strictly speaking, however, vertical integration is not
a concept peculiar to automation. In fact, it has several connotations in different domains that may be
distinguished:
• In an economical context, it denotes the extent to which a company has control of the processes
involved in the manufacturing of its products. Full vertical integration in this case means full
control over the entire value chain from raw material production until the assembly of the final
product [RO03].
• In a business and organizational context, it concerns the information exchange between the various
management levels in a company or an agglomerate of companies. The relevant property here is the
control of the decision flow across the hierarchies.
• In an automation context, finally, it means the data exchange between all automation levels inside a
plant. In particular, it denotes the interconnection of automation and office networks on a technological
level, and the linkage of field-level control and planning tools on an application level [S07].
This chapter will focus on the latter aspects of vertical integration, and there again especially on
the technological issues. It will shed some light on the evolution of the integration idea from the first
13-1
© 2011 by Taylor and Francis Group, LLC