Redundancy in PLCnext Technology

In engineering, redundant systems are key for enhancing operational reliability: Critical components are intentionally duplicated (in safety-critical systems: triplicated) to provide a permanent backup or fail-safe to take over operations immediately in case the main component fails. 

In PLCnext Technology, redundancy is implemented in two ways:

  1. System redundancy by means of two specialized high-performance PLCnext Control devices:
     RFC 4072R with firmware release 2022.0 LTS is developed especially for the purpose of working as a redundancy tandem.
  2. Applicative System Redundancy (ASR) by means of the PROFINET system redundancy:
    The PROFINET standard describes several types of system redundancy. PLCnext Control supports PROFINET system redundancy type S2 according to that PROFINET specification. Of course, you'll have to run a PROFINET station in order to use this mechanism.

In a use case of the Belgian tunnel authorities both methods were evaluated, and system redundancy was the path to follow for that case. Now a set of pairs of RFC 4072Rs is working smoothly in traffic tunnels of Brussels.

 

See Also

  1. Introduction to ASR
  2. PLCnext Engineer for redundant systems
  3. Function block for Controller Redundancy
  4. Function blocks for Data Synchronization
  5. Function block for gathering port states from bus couplers
  6. Function block for gathering SNMP values from managed switches
  7. System redundancy with RFC 4072R
  8. IP addresses at redundant controllers
  9. Configuring redundant PROFINET devices
  10. Redundancy error codes
  11. System variables - Redundancy

 

• Published/reviewed: 2024-10-30   ☀  Revision 074 •