Abstract
The ever-increasing demand for system autonomy in all kinds of applications is accompanied by the need for increased fault-tolerance to build highly-reliable systems. EtherCAT technology is one of the most widely used industrial Ethernet solutions for process control and automation. While EtherCAT provides some fault-tolerance mechanisms, it does not protect an industrial control system against the malfunction of its master node. In this paper, we present a software-based master redundancy protocol for EtherCAT, which enables an EtherCAT network to seamlessly recover from master node failures within the same communication cycle. Moreover, the protocol integrates seamlessly into new and existing applications without the need to re-implement functionality and without running into compatibility problems. Experimental results showed that communication cycles in the sub-millisecond range are supported. Hence, the presented master redundancy protocol provides an easy to use, scalable, and cost-effective solution to increase the reliability of EtherCAT networks.
Supported by the H2020 project TEACHING (n. 871385) - www.teaching-h2020.eu.
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Dobaj, J., Seidl, M., Krug, T., Krisper, M., Macher, G. (2020). A Seamless Self-configuring EtherCAT Master Redundancy Protocol. In: Yilmaz, M., Niemann, J., Clarke, P., Messnarz, R. (eds) Systems, Software and Services Process Improvement. EuroSPI 2020. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1251. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56441-4_28
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