Technical Abstract
The requirements for diagnostics in industrial control applications have grown continuously over the last decade and have become a critical requirement for many industrial control applications. This paper describes a conceptual scalable and highly flexible diagnostic framework for application and system diagnostics, to be deployed in end devices and in diagnostic aggregator devices. Diagnostic aggregators make it possible to collect and store the diagnostic information for a subnet and provide that information to higher level supervisory diagnostic system tools sitting on upper level plant network(s). The proposed diagnostic framework is based on existing CIP™ communication mechanisms and also extends existing mechanisms to adapt the Heartbeat diagnostic notification to EtherNet/IP™.
High level alarms, warnings, and event flags are generated by the end device in Device Heartbeat notification message, with the more detailed diagnostic data of interest for the device logged and stored within the product. The diagnostic data stored within a product are accessible in a standard way using CIP™ communications and objects. This allows cross vendor platforms to be used to analyze and diagnose the information details after receiving a Device Heartbeat notification from an aggregator. Enhancements to the EDS make it possible for supervision systems to map and present internationalized text strings for all events with little resources needed in end devices. Higher level end devices with more memory resources have the option to store all the texts strings associated with events internally.
Paper and presentation from the 2014 ODVA Industry Conference & 16th Annual Meeting
Joakim Wiberg, HMS Industrial Networks