Advanced Industrial Communications.

The paper deals with the new advanced industrial communication solutions concepts. It describes basic structures of industrial distributed control systems and physical and application layers of the most commonly used standards. The main differences between industrial real-time communications and information data network communications are classified and convergence trends of both of them are emphasized. The Ethernet standard is mentioned and the requirements for industrial Ethernet implementation declared. The progressive leading solution ETHERNET Powerlink is introduced. The contribution outlines the structure of an advanced distributed control node and declares the new conception of the virtual application communication bus with an example CANopen - ETHERNET Powerlink. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]