The key to Industry 4.0 is the merging of the IT world with the production landscape. With its uniform horizontal and vertical communication capabilities, the real-time POWERLINK network is the perfect tool for making this happen. The Ethernet POWERLINK Standardization Group (EPSG) will be taking advantage of the Hannover Messe (Hall 9 / Booth F25) to demonstrate just how easy it is to implement complete automation solutions with POWERLINK.
Taking the next steps to Smart Factories
"From the very beginning, open standards have been an important part of POWERLINK technology," says Stefan Schönegger, managing director of the EPSG. "It is clear from all of the discussions concerning Industry 4.0 that this is the way of the future. We can therefore safely say that we have already begun taking the next steps in the design and implementation of Smart Factories."
More than 3,000 OEMs rely on POWERLINK. This advanced protocol offers hard real-time characteristics in addition to a high-capacity communication bandwidth, making it possible to design applications for things like synchronizing axes with extremely high precision while transferring camera images over the same physical architecture.
Because this technology is fully compliant with the IEEE 802.3 Ethernet standard, POWERLINK can be used on any Ethernet infrastructure whatsoever. In addition, POWERLINK and the bus-independent safety protocol openSAFETY are 100% vendor-independent. "These technologies will no doubt play an important role in merging the worlds of IT and production," says Schönegger.
