Industrial Needs For Time-Critical Wireless Communication & Wireless Data Transmission And Application Layer Support For Time-Critical Communication

The OLCHFA project synthesises leading-edge technologies in the areas of fieldbus, wireless communication and time-critical systems to address the data communications requirements at the low level of the manufacturing integration hierarchy. It aims at extending an existing fieldbus solution to provide these facilities. The OLCHFA project consortium, which is partly funded by the CEC, includes two industrial demonstration sites to ensure that the system specification meets the real user requirements as well as providing test scenarios for evaluation of the OLCHFA time-critical communication system. For reasons of technical suitability and compatibility with proposed international standards, the French FIP fieldbus is being used as the base platform for the hardware and software development. The software development includes extending the application layer services and creating tools to facilitate easy configuration and management of an OLCHFA communication network. The hardware development includes the production of prototype hardware modules incorporating a custom clock chip and FIP communications processor.