A FIP prototype network for numerical control applications

The difficulty of reaching an agreement on a single standard fieldbus proposal inside the international standardization bodies has led some national organizations in Europe to develop their own fieldbuses and to adopt them in pilot applications. At present FIP and PROFIBUS appear to be the most widely accepted solutions and some commercial products based on these standards are beginning to be introduced on the market. Fieldbuses were primarily conceived for process control applications, however this paper deals with a project aimed at showing the use of the field bus technology in general, and of the FIP protocol, in particular, in the numerical control field i.e. to connect the controller, sensors and actuators inside a single machine. In such a way two benefits can be achieved immediately: a dramatic reduction in the number of cables inside a single machine and a simple low-cost interface with the manufacturing environment which is based on fieldbus communication technology. In the first phase of the authors´ project the controller, sensors and actuators are simulated by software programs running on a network of personal computers called FIPNET while in a second phase the hardware and software components will be ported to a prototype environment containing real devices. The main goal of FIPNET is to verify whether the FIP fieldbus is able to meet the real-time requirements of the NC applications