The article entitled “Migrating Legacy Ethernet-Based Traffic with Spatial Redundancy to TSN networks”, from the research group in Systems, Robotics and Vision of the Department of Mathematics and Informatics of the UIB, has been awarded the Factory Automation Best Paper Award at the 27th IEEE International Conference on Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation (ETFA 2022), an international congress held in Stuttgart, Germany, from September 6 to 9, 2022.
ETFA is one of the main conferences of the Industrial Electronics Society (IES) of the IEEE. In this conference, experts from academia and industry gather to disseminate, discuss and encourage the development and adoption of new methods, models and tools for the design and operation of automated manufacturing systems and automation systems in general.
The awarded article extends a set of tools designed to contribute to the adoption of a new technology of industrial communication networks based on Ethernet and known by the name Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN). Industry and academia are making great efforts to adopt TSN, as this technology will not only improve the real-time response and reliability of these industrial networks, but will also enable the integration of automation with information systems in the context of the Internet of Things (IoT). This integration is essential to enable new applications and digital services, such as intelligent automation systems in smart cities; intelligent electricity production and distribution networks (smart grids), or intelligent, connected and flexible factories (smart factories).
The transition to TSN must be gradual and it is of great importance that new automation installations based on TSN can be designed as easily as possible from existing installations based on old network technologies. The article takes as its starting point a set of tools that, in order to facilitate this transition to TSN of facilities, transforms traffic from legacy networks to TSN traffic. Unfortunately, this toolkit was not able to do this transformation when the traffic was redundant (when the traffic had replicated messages). This limitation was very relevant, given that many automation installations are highly reliable and critical, and need replicated messages to ensure that the different parts of the system exchange information correctly. The article extends this toolkit with a series of mechanisms that make it possible to transform this traffic containing replicated messages and therefore represents a significant step towards being able to adopt TSN in critical automation facilities.
Article reference:
M. Jover; M. Barranco; I. Álvarez i J. Proenza. «Migrating Legacy Ethernet-based Traffic with Spatial Redundancy to TSN». Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation (ETFA 2022), Stuttgart, 2022.
Link to the article:
https://srv.uib.es/migrating-legacy-ethernet-based-traffic-with-spatial-redundancy-to-tsn-networks/