PERFORMABILITY EVALUATION OF PROFIBUS-DP MULTI-MASTER NETWORKS IN INDUSTRIAL RELEVANT SCENARIOS

The operation of networked control systems strongly depends on the performance of its communication infrastructure. Therefore, their evaluation becomes an important aspect to be considered, particularly in situations where network traffic has real-time constraints and the network operates in faulty environments. In this paper a set of fault injection experiments were performed on a Profibus-DP network in order to assess the impact of faults in the network operation. The experiments reproduce typical conditions found in industrial applications, considering different traffic loads and fault scenarios. Several performance metrics were evaluated, such as the bus cycle time, messages response times and worst case response times. Copyright © 2007 IFAC.