This paper analyzes the transmission of images through Profibus for applications concerned with the processing of images integrated in control systems, by means of a detailed study of two real cases with different bandwidth requirements. We analyze the special features of an artificial vision system making use of Profibus as a transport system, the scheduling of the traffic in order to guarante...

PROFIBUS is an international standard (IEC 61158, EN 50170) for factory-floor communications, with several thousands of installations worldwide. Taking into account the increasing need for mobile devices in industrial environments, one obvious solution is to extend traditional wired PROFIBUS networks with wireless capabilities. In this paper, we outline the major aspects of a hybrid wired/wirel...

A recent trend in distributed computer-controlled systems (DCCS) is to interconnect the distributed elements by means of a multi-point broadcast network. As the network bus is shared between a number of network nodes, there is an access contention, which must be solved by the medium access control (MAC) protocol. Usually, DCCS impose real-time constraints. In essence, by real-time constraints w...

A cluster tool for semiconductor manufacturing is an integrated device that consists of several single wafer processing modules and a wafer transport module based on a robot. The distributed module controllers are integrated by an inter-module communication network and are coordinated by a centralized controller, called a cluster tool controller (CTC). Since the CTC monitors and coordinates the...