Fieldbus control system project support tool based on experimental analysis and modeling of communication bus

The evaluation of a fieldbus system performance controlling a given process is very important on the project phase; this information leads to a precise forecast of the delivered communication services level that will available on the operational condition. This paper proposes a modeling technique of the medium access control (MAC) mechanism for the foundation fieldbus (FF) protocol that can be used for the building of a fieldbus project support tool. The MAC simulation model is implemented on a real-time state machine algorithm that communicates with simulated fieldbus nodes to properly close the necessaries communication loops. All the MAC and communication simulations are PC-based and performed over the National Instruments Lab VIEW™ platform, the proposed model can be considered hybrid because it is based both on technical FF specification and on experimental data acquired from the communication bus of a commercial fieldbus system. The validation and verification of the model is also shown on the paper.