Communication in industrial automation—What is going on?

Fieldbus systems have been successfully introduced into industrial automation. Nowadays, a large community is inventing the usage of Ethernet-based local communication systems in this domain ensuring the real-time, safe and secure behaviour of these systems. Future scenarios of geographically distributed production plants or services require the use of heterogeneous networks consisting of local and wide area, and wired and wireless communication systems operated by different authorities. Thus, behaviour has to be supplemented by context awareness realised by location-based communication services and context-sensitive applications. This paper will mainly address the ongoing activities in the field of using heterogeneous networks within the automation domain.