Der RDC-Ring, Ein Fehlertolerantes, Dezentral- und Ereignisgesteuertes Lichtleiter-Kommunikationsnetz

Nowadays, the tasks of industrial automation of the office and of technical systems become increasingly more voluminous and complex. In particular one recognizes a strong trend towards the interconnection of computer aided singular solutions for different applications in process control, industrial management, design and development etc. This situation requires the reliable powerful and economic interconnection of distributed computer systems by means of local area networks (LAN’s). This paper describes a fault-tolerant fiber optic LAN with event driven, decentral and collisionfree access control. It is called the RDC-Ring. The design principles with respect to basic mechanisms influencing the performance characteristics and measures for fault diagnosis and fault tolerance are discussed. Then the protocol corresponding to the bottom two layers of the ISO Reference Model of Open Systems Interconnections is described in some detail with all services including the network management services. Finally some results and experiences of several industrial control systems are reported.