Transparent factories through industrial internets

The mass appeal and acceptance of the Internet in business, education and recreation has sparked considerable interest in pushing this technology onto the factory floor. Along with the Internet, Ethernet, has become the de facto standard for networking. Ethernet´s economy of scales (over 100 million nodes installed) makes it the preferred choice in networking architectures. The protocol, which has made all this technology work together, is TCP/IP. In order, to push this technology one final step down to the factory floor, an open automation framework is required. Using the Modbus protocol (a de facto standard industrial networking protocol) over industry standard TCP/IP, makes the transparent factory automation framework a reality.