Best industrial networking application of 2007
The magazine “Fieldbus & Networks” (published by Ente Fiera Milano) awarded the best published application of industrial networking in 2007 to the Italian branch of Hirschmann Automation and Control.
The award refers to the first large-scale Ethernet/IP application in the world carried out on a flexographic machine for printing four full-color newspapers with up to 192 pages. The machine is manufactured by the Italian company Officine Meccaniche Giovanni Cerutti SpA (Cerutti Group), a company located in Casale Monferrato, near Milan. Officine Meccaniche Giovanni Cerutti is the worldwide market leader in rotogravure and flexographic printing machines for weekly magazines and newspapers.
The new solution, strongly promoted by the head of the Cerutti automation team and relying on an active technical co-operation between Hirschmann and Rockwell Automation during the prototyping phases, still remains the largest installation of Ethernet/IP on a single machine in the world. The size of the project is shown in the numbers: 498 EtherNet/IP nodes manage about 13.000 digital and analog I/Os, these are then partitioned in 34 interconnected Ethernet sub-networks responsible for controlling specific sections of the machine and running with a peer-to-peer communication cycle time of 15ms.
In order to implement a reliable communication infrastructure capable of managing the impressive automation system, several tests were started in 2005. Cerutti and Rockwell Automation chose the RS20 family: each printing machine houses approximately 100 switches ranging from 24 to 8 ports copper ports that co-exist in different level of an articulated tree-structured network. A big result achieved in the project is the dramatic reduction of fieldbus utilization: seven of them were collapsed into the Ethernet/IP infrastructure, clearly showing the benefit of reducing the number of parts, simplifying the connections, avoiding problems in cabling and a significant reduction in the cost of the machine.
The solution was so flexible and positive that the same architecture was installed in six other smaller machines - all exclusively based on Ethernet networks. For the larger machines, open development could involve another 1000 devices, including encoders, valve solenoids and other subsystems that might be integrated into the Ethernet network
The Industrial Networking team of the Italian branch of Hirschmann Automation and Control.