Documents our efforts to develop a scalable low-cost and high-performance network infrastructure for a novel distributed automation system-minifactory. The resulting communication system (AAA-Net) relies on a suite of low-latency protocols carried by a commercial 100 Mb Fast Ethernet network. In addition to documenting the operation of this network system and its associated protocols we offer a brief comparison to the currently available commercial field network systems, and present experimental verification of the performance delivered by AAA-Net under typical and extreme operating conditions.
['Shinji Kume', 'Alfred A. Rizzi']
A high-performance network infrastructure and protocols for distributed automation