TTTech’s co-founder and executive board member Georg Kopetz had the honor of being the closing keynote speaker of this year’s TSNA conference. Experts and key players from various industries discussed current and emerging Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) standards and their potential for industrial applications.
The theme of the keynote was the promotion of standardization and alliances, starting with the assertion that Deterministic Ethernet supports the major trends that we are seeing in the fields of automotive and industrial technology. TTTech is using Deterministic Ethernet to deliver communication guarantees for autonomous driving, to converge safety and non-safety control functions in wind turbines and to give robot makers access to machine data in the scope of the industrial Internet of Things.”
Georg Kopetz stressed the need for industries to agree on standard platforms, using manufacturing as an example: “Industry 4.0 requires the creation of open, standard infrastructures. Combining TSN with OPC UA ensures that there is one standard communications protocol for all infrastructure elements, including real-time systems. For industrial automation companies this means that relevant machine data can be easily and securely provided to the end user for important business cases like predictive maintenance, without the need to support a multitude of proprietary protocols or data formats. TTTech is developing its TSN to include even ultra-low latency machine communication in this infrastructure.”
He closed the keynote by calling on key players from various industries to collaborate. “In order to realize the potential of TSN, it is vital that strong alliances are built between vendors from across the spectrum. TTTech recognizes this and is actively involved in AVnu, in the OPC Foundation, and in the Industrial Internet Consortium with the TSN testbed for manufacturing applications. These endeavors will lead to a move away from disparate proprietary protocols towards standard and interoperable industry profiles where IT/OT infrastructure is fully integrated”.