The SUPPRESS research group has a demonstrator for research and training in Automation and Industrial Control. This demonstrator has been designed in such a way that the different devices that make it up communicate using a wide variety of protocols, those most commonly used in the industry: Modbus TCP, Ethernet/IP, Profinet, Devicenet, Ethercat, etc.
The system consists of three industrial automation rings. The main ring has PLCs and remote input/output units, which can exchange information using either Modbus TCP or Ethernet/IP protocols. The two I/O cards manage transmitters and actuators that are either directly wired to them or connected via ASi, Modbus RTU, etc. fieldbuses.
In addition, the demonstrator has two secondary rings. The first of these is basically responsible for managing communication protocol changes. For this purpose, there are gateways linking different types of networks: Modbus TCP/IP – Devicenet, Modbus TCP – Profinet, Profinet – EtherCat, etc. Downstream of each gateway are the drives that use these protocols, which are frequency inverters with the specific communications card. The second ring is auxiliary to the main ring. The devices that comprise it are mostly slaves of the master PLCs of the main ring, which exchange information using the same protocols as the main ring and incorporate new ones, such as Profibus DP or CANOpen.
The supervisory level of the demonstrator houses the SCADA system as well as the log server. Communication between the supervisory network and the control network is filtered by a Tofino firewall with application level inspection, allowing only authorised communications.
