Communication Redundancy for Reliability Improvement in an Industrial Monitoring and Control System

In development of monitoring and control systems, one of the most important points is to consider a redundancy so that the system can be operated normally although hardware faults are partly occurred. The purpose of this paper is to introduce a monitoring and control system with a redundancy function for I/O servers and communication networks. I/O servers composed with an active server and a standby server. Each server also has 3 communication ports, 2 ports of them were connected to field units and the other 1 port was connected to the other server. Field units have to be constructed to 2 communication ports connected I/O servers through communication lines. Also, server communication module was implemented for analyzing and handling fault elements. and was submodularized for linking easily with a monitoring and control module. An experiment with 2 servers and 2 field units was constructed to demonstrate its effectiveness.