Availability of Pyramid Industrial Networks
Hassanein Hamed Amer, Magdi Sami Moustafa, Ramèz M. Daoud · 2006
This paper studies the availability of the pyramid architecture in the context of networked control systems. Two machines working in an in-line production scheme are supervised by an upper level node. The supervisor, as well as both machines' networks are running on top of Gigabit Ethernet in star topology. It is shown that it is very important, from a reliability point of view, to have an access panel on at least one of the machines. In this case, the supervisor reliability has to be much higher than that of the machines. The Markov models used in the analysis can be used to calculate system availability and can also be used as a design tool