Learn industrial ethernet at RMIT

Stuart Corner
Monday, 05 September 2011 15:23

Business IT - Networking

RMIT University has teamed up with Belden Australia to offer training and certification in industrial ethernet, on-site anywhere in Australia and New Zealand and on-campus at RMIT.

Belden is participating through its subsidiary Hirschmann Automation and Control and the training and certification will be offered on the Hirschmann platform, allowing students to obtain certification as a Hirschmann Industrial Systems Engineer (HiSE) or Hirschmann Industrial Network Engineer (HiNE).'

According to Bruce Kendall Senior educator in RMIT's School of Engineering (TAFE), Industrial ethernet is a rapidly evolving technology for networking and communication. 'It's vital to a range of industries, including oil and gas, metals and mining, water, food, road, rail and air transportation, power, manufacturing, and building automation."

Adam Callender, marketing director Belden Asia Pacific, said: 'A successful implementation requires knowledge surrounding total lifecycle from the physical and logical design, component selection, engineering and configuration, installation and testing, operations and maintenance, disaster recovery and expansions/upgrades."

According to Wikipedia, industrial ethernet - use of ethernet technologies fro automation and process control, is relatively new "Until recently, a PLC (programmable logic controller) would communicate with a slave machine using one of several possible open or proprietary protocols, such as Modbus, Sinec H1, Profibus, CANopen, DeviceNet or FOUNDATION Fieldbus.

"However [there has been] increased to use Ethernet as the link-layer protocol, with one of the above protocols as the application-layer (as in the OSI model)'¦ By using standard ethernet, automation systems from different manufacturers can be interconnected throughout a process plant.

"Industrial ethernet takes advantage of the relatively larger marketplace for computer interconnections using Ethernet to reduce cost and improve performance of communications between industrial controllers."