Five Key Factors for Factory Communication:
A highly efficient, intelligent factory network must offer open, self-correcting, and highly secure Ethernet connectivity, from field device networks to SCADA systems and backbone networks, to optimize plant-wide communications and operational efficiency. Five factors are particularly important: security, management, availability, robustness, and integration, which together form a smart strategy for implementing factory communication.
Security:
With cyber risks increasing daily as the world becomes more connected, factory managers must find the best way to detect cyber threats to mitigate potential risks and reduce the impact on factory operations and facilities. Factories can prevent network threats across factory cells, zones, and fields by using an all-in-one solution that supports an industrial firewall, VPN, NAT, and Ethernet switch. This provides multiple layers of defense-in-depth protection for the entire network infrastructure, without incurring additional data transmission costs.
Management:
There are four basic aspects to the implementation and management of factory networks: installation, operation, maintenance, and diagnostics. Even with careful network planning and design, these four aspects of network management still present a number of SCADA and field challenges for engineers. To optimize network efficiency, maximize system uptime, and minimize total cost of ownership, smart factory networks not only require robust hardware well-suited to harsh industrial environments, but also user-centric software tools for SCADA system integration and the assurance that engineers can easily and efficiently monitor and manage their network.
Availability:
Factory network outages can cause costly downtime and collateral damage. To prevent network failures, factory networks must implement millisecond-level self-correcting redundancy technology in the automation of control and management of smart factory network facilities. To further ensure continuous data transmission during multipoint failovers, multipoint network redundancy can be achieved by incorporating bypass relay technology to trace network traffic around inactive network nodes and forward traffic to another active node.
Robustness:
For complex factory systems, device durability is critical to doing more with less. When a plant operates continuously and without interruption, field engineers spend less time and effort on downtime corrections. Network equipment used in a factory needs to share a common set of robust features designed to eliminate device failures due to adverse environmental factors.
• Fanless operation across wide temperature ranges for increased MTBF
• Powerful EMI/EMC shielding, and shock and vibration resistance for enhanced operability
• Redundant power supply with isolation protection
Integration:
More often than not, a factory network must integrate legacy fieldbus network devices that cannot connect directly to an Ethernet network. To improve operational reliability and communication efficiency, it is important for all field devices to be able to connect to an Ethernet network. One way to integrate field devices with a smart factory network is through industrial Ethernet gateways, which convert fieldbus protocols to Ethernet. Furthermore, for a PLC control network, network switches need to support a variety of different industrial protocols, including EtherNet/IP, PROFINET, or Modbus TCP, so they can be managed by a PLC and integrated with a SCADA system.
Moxa's optimized industrial Ethernet solutions for smart factories.
Moxa's broad product range and vertical expertise enable smart network architectures that allow factories to utilize both existing and new equipment to increase production and uptime and optimize plant-wide communication and operational efficiency.
