Standard field bus networks for industrial applications

This paper deals with three emerging proposals for standardizing industrial field bus networks. Even though significant work is being done by some international organizations to develop suitable field bus standards, a wide consensus is still to be reached on which features this kind of subnetworks must exhibit and on the protocol mechanisms which are necessary to support them. The aim of this paper is to present the solutions introduced in FIP, PROFIBUS, and SERCOS network architectures which have already been adopted as national standards by some European countries. These field buses are compared briefly and some formulas are introduced in order to offer the reader a preliminary evaluation of the performance which can be expected from this kind of systems.