Ethernet Enabling Serial Devices in High Availability Manufacturing

Today, manufacturing organizations world wide are working on reducing complexity in the manufacturing process and increasing the transparency of processes throughout the enterprise.
The ability to communicate data from any part of the enterprise to any other part of the enterprise is core to making modern manufacturing work.

The venerable Purdue model of manufacturing has been compressed to the three layers shown here. There is the plant floor, and all the communications that occur there. There is the MOM system, which connects the plant floor to the manufacturing business systems, and to the enterprise business system.

On the plant floor, there are communications tasks between field devices and machines, the controllers on the floor, and the control systems that sit above the controller level, the unit control systems in discrete manufacturing and the DCS (distributed control systems) in process automation. Between the plant floor and the business systems there are communications requirements for instantaneous communications between the MOM systems and the other systems like asset management, production control, and production management.