Cancelled, sorry! Our speaker has just been made redundant by his employer.

This presentation would have detailed the suitability of the PROFIBUS specification (IEC 61158-4/5/6-3) for use in redundant applications. To quote the author:

“It details the standard’s state machine processing flows and highlights areas that currently place constraints on redundant master switchover determinism. The presenter will describe various redundancy architectures and associated network topologies. It highlights the lessons learnt and system control benefits from implementing PROFIBUS in a communications protocol offload engine capable of running co-operative multi-tasking multi-threaded software. The offload engine can be operably coupled to ARM or Power Architecture CPUs.

This type of controlled and synchronized layer 2 implementation can yield an error mitigating handover that, in turn, can be used on masters to switch in/out redundant nodes. On slaves (and masters) it can be used to switch bus parameters (IEC timers e.g. mintsdr, addresses, baud rate etc.) on the fly. It details test results, measurements and a scheme yielding a very fast, efficient and error mitigating master redundancy handover, achievable with no discernible impact to the slaves. The synchronization, switchover and return to a controlling state can be achieved with a single poll cycle perturbation, meaning the master need not transition from active to any other state.”

It was to have been presented by Graham Edmiston who did a lot of work on this subject.