Network time synchronization in a safe automation network

Author

Novak, Thomas ; Sevcik, Berndt

Author_Institution

Inst. of Comput. Technol., Vienna Univ. of Technol., Vienna

fYear

2008

fDate

21-23 May 2008

Firstpage

305

Lastpage

313

Abstract

Today there is a great request of using automation networks in safety critical environments. Thus, such systems used in industrial and building automation have been enhanced with safety features derived from strict safety requirements specified in IEC 61508. One of the safety requirements to be met is the detection of hazardous events on the network such as the delay of a message. A safety measure to identify these hazardous events is the use of a timestamp within a safe protocol. However, a common time base among the nodes must be provided - by means of a network time synchronization mechanism. A centralized and decentralized approach was developed within the SafetyLon project. Realization of the concept and implementation in the producer/consumer model of SafetyLon is outlined.

Keywords

building management systems; field buses; safety systems; synchronisation; IEC 61508; SafetyLon project; centralized approach; decentralized approach; hazardous event detection; industrial automation; message delay; network time synchronization mechanism; producer/consumer model; safe building automation network; safe field bus protocol; safety critical environment; timestamping; Automation; Delay; Event detection; Hardware; Hazards; IEC standards; Redundancy; Safety devices; Software systems; Stochastic systems;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Factory Communication Systems, 2008. WFCS 2008. IEEE International Workshop on

Conference_Location

Dresden

Print_ISBN

978-1-4244-2349-1

Electronic_ISBN

978-1-4244-2350-7

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/WFCS.2008.4638717

Filename

4638717