Performance Evaluation of the Standard Proway Network for Process Control

A sort of informal and formal standardization process is now under development so as to obtain ``standard´´ technologies which can be efficiently used for the networking of given distributed applications. An example of this trend in the Proway architecture that is developed by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) to obtain a Local Area Network (LAN) for industrial process control. The aim of this paper is to present a performance evaluation of the Proway network by using a simulation approach. By this we determine the field of applicability of such a standard to obtain a distributed system for process control. The paper shows not only the service quality offered by the Proway, but also an automated method to study the performances of a wide class of distributed systems. The results show that low service time and high throughput are not consistent, so that, during the design of the network, it is necessary to choose what feature is more important for the considered application. A simulator is a powerful tool that can help the designer to choose the best compromise among various parameters and might be used to obtain the parameter variability range which provides the expected performances.