Assessment of PROFIBUS networks using a fault injection framework

Industrial control systems architectures have been evolving to the decentralization of control tasks. This evolution associated with the time-critical nature of these tasks, increases the dependability requirements for one of their most critical components: the communication system. Therefore, this is an important aspect on the control system design which must be properly evaluated. In this paper the dependability of a PROFIBUS network is assessed. By using of a fault injection framework the network operation is disturbed with fault scenarios which are representative of industrial environments. From these experiments, the stability of the PROFIBUS logical ring is analyzed, the main outages causes are identified and their probabilities are obtained