Self-Configuring Safety Networks

In the context of Industry 4.0, production lines as part of Cyper-Physical Systems (CPS) have specific demands for interoperability and flexibility. Machinery, being part of these production lines, has additional requirements in terms of functional safety and real-time communications. The re-configuration of functional safety systems, which is characterized by high manual configuration efforts, leads to time-intensive and expensive downtimes. This paper presents the requirements on and the concept of self-configuring safety networks, which reduces the engineering efforts and allows the operator of production lines convenient re-configuration of safety functions and devices. The proposed concept is based on the vendor-neutral technologies Ethernet, Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN), and OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA).