BRINGING INDUSTRIAL MULTIMEDIA TO THE FACTORY-FLOOR: WHAT IS AT STAKE WITH RFIELDBUS?

摘要

The support of new information technologies and applications in the factory-floor, such as multimedia applications, is moving from eagerness to a real need. In this paper we will discuss the motivation for embodying industrial multimedia application support into existent fieldbus communication systems. The RFieldbus project is one example of an initiative where this objective has been successfully carried out. Without going into details neither in the RFieldbus specification nor in the internals of the multimedia applications related with the discrete parts manufacturing field trial (a pilot application developed in the framework of the RFieldbus project), we want to put forward some functionalities which are possible to implement with RFieldbus. The field trial itself is a complex distributed computer control system with a wide set of software applications, ranging from small software components, to large (distributed) applications. This pilot implementation provides a suitable framework and test-bed for the assessment of integrated multimedia and real-time control traffic in the same network, and the use of hybrid wired/wireless networks for Distributed Computer-Control Systems.