Flexible integration of various fieldbus and sensor/actuator bus systems into machine tool control

Abstract

 This paper deals with the integration of different types of standardised and available fieldbus and sensor/actuator bus systems into control systems and applications. The concept for integration and the first steps of realisation considering the bus systems PROFIBUS, CAN and INTERBUS are presented here. This includes a simple but unified application programming interface (API) on all underlying interfaces including standardised fieldbus systems and other improvements for the adaptation to different fieldbus systems. A main feature of these improvements is that there is no recompilation necessary in case of exchanging field bus systems, making the integration of different fieldbus systems much easier. The remaining work for the system integrator is to modify a few configuration tables which are written in ASCII text and easy to handle. The presented concept is realised using VME bus systems with Motorola CPU board, real time operating system OS-9 and hard- and software modules for the interfaces to PROFIBUS, CAN and INTERBUS.