Tool support for evaluating temporal characteristics of industrial protocols

Abstract

In fieldbus automation systems, the correctness of the real time behavior depends not only on the intra-device processing and process scheduling, but also on the inter-device communication that exchanges process variables information. The article presents a tool to evaluate temporal characteristics of industrial communication protocols. It can monitor runtime timing requirements of proposed communication, according to variable conditions affecting the communication, and present graphically time characteristics of the resulting validation. Two case studies, one evaluating the real time characteristics of the Foundation Fieldbus protocol and another one evaluating timing characteristics of the CSMA medium access protocol used are presented in order to validate the features of the presented tool.