Until now no continuous monitoring of communication lines in interconnected machinery

The conditions and processes in machines and industrial plant are continuously monitored to enable highly automated processes in industry to run smoothly. However, what is still missing, because there has been no suitable procedure to do so, is the wiring of ethernet based communications which enables rapid, secure data exchange and links up networked industrial plant. It is only at the commissioning or during maintenance (if the machine is stopped for the purpose) that these physical connections are checked. But cables in production areas can be put under great strain by constant bending: for instance, when they are carried over drag chains. The strain can cause the data transfer quality to deteriorate and may even lead to cable breakages. With current methods, such changes in the cable properties are not at present being monitored, which makes the cables an additional weak point in any system.

A solution for continuously monitoring communication cables to ensure trouble-free production

With a view to reducing the associated downtime and maintenance effort to a minimum, methods were designed, developed and evaluated in the Ko2SiBus project, to enable the monitoring of the signal quality in the Ethernet cable continuously and cost-effectively for a plant during its regular operation without any interruption to the actual communications. The methods conceived were implemented in the form of a prototype. Its effectiveness was proven in laboratory tests.

This should not only make it easier to plan maintenance work. The new concept should also make it possible to pass on the data from the monitoring through a unified open interface so that it can be easily integrated into customer-specific control systems,possibly as a switch extension or as a feature installed directly into the end device.

IMMS created a circuit concept and constructed a demonstrator

The role of IMMS in the continuous monitoring scheme of communication lines was to design an embedded system and develop the appropriate circuit concepts, creating a system that tracks physical signal parameters using integrated analogue and digital components and reports any deviations to a monitoring centre. The functionality was tested with a demonstrator largely built by IMMS. The demonstrator maps the entire start-to-finish system from the signal measurements through to graphical representation of the analysis and the integration possibilities. It can also be used to manipulate the Ethernet signals very specifically, for example to simulate cable faults artificially or to show the influence of such faults.