Page 17 - EngineerIt April 2021

TIME SENSITIVE NETWORKS

Five ways the IEEE Standards will

advance industry 4.0

By Jordon Woods, director of Deterministic Ethernet Technology

Across the world, I meet with customers investing hundreds of thousands, even millions, into making
the promise of Industry 4.0 a reality. This new paradigm of ubiquitous connectivity is inspiring
manufacturers, from the largest automation OEMs to emerging businesses. They see the potential
to make their businesses more productive, efficient, adaptable and profitable for the bottom line and
ultimately for their employees, stakeholders and customers.

ndustry 4.0 promises unprecedented be obtained. However, in most factories today, data lives in siloes where it sits isolated and
levels of flexibility that translate inaccessible - and therefore unactionable. For years, manufacturers have tried to resolve
Iinto agile production by allowing this, but working in siloes has stunted these projects.
manufacturers to adapt to seasonal or Enter time sensitive networking (TSN), a set of IEEE Ethernet standards that is
changing customer needs, for example. foundational for meeting the many powerful outcomes of Industry 4.0. With TSN, all data
We will be able to improve uptime (which across the factory - from the floor to servers, front office and everywhere in between - can
controls overhead and maintenance coexist and communicate. Because TSN is the first step to breaking down existing data
costs), reduce resource time and siloes that hinder industrial communications, it can enable ubiquitous access to precious,
involvement, and boost business and decision-making data.
customer confidence. These are just a TSN is the jumping off point for helping industrial organisations achieve the promise of
few examples of potentially industry- Industry 4.0 in five key ways, all rooted in making data more accessible.
changing outcomes we can anticipate as Creates a common language. By creating a uniform understanding of time
a result of the fourth industrial revolution. synchronisation—and uniform treatment of all data packets and information— TSN allows
Underscoring these massive data to speak a common language. While equipment inter-operability challenges will still
opportunities is the need to acquire, exist, manufacturers will be able to derive more value from their data that can now all
communicate, and analyse data. Data, coexist in the same Ethernet path.
and most importantly the insights Enables scalability and agility. TSN can help Ethernet manage a range of transmission
extracted from that data, is the currency rates for data sends so that there is enough bandwidth for data throughput at all priority
by which all of these improvements can levels. Ultimately, manufacturers can add or reduce capacity more easily and adapt to

Figure 1: Time sensitive networks solve the four main requirements of time, traffic shaping, synchronisation and bounded latency.

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