Simplifying the engineering of modular PROFINET IO devices

PROFINET IO is designed with a modular structure of the IO devices. Certified modular PROFINET IO devices are usually shipped with a General Station Description (GSD) file that does not contain the actual module configuration of the IO device. With common appliances the modules must subsequently be configured manually in the engineering tool. This can become an elaborate task in large PROFINET IO installations and it would therefore be useful to have some tool support to automatically detect and import the actually installed modules in an IO device. As a solution we propose a GSD file generator that creates the GSD file with the actual module configuration by retrieving the real data from the device via SNMP. This paper presents the implemented mechanism and gives some attention to certification issues.