Research on industrial field network protocol of locomotive manufacturing enterprise

The characteristics of four mainstream protocols including Ethernet/IP, Profinet, EtherCAT and Ethernet Powerlink in industrial field network are analyzed respectively in the paper. According to the different requirements of the on-site production line level control system and the internal network of the automation equipment, it is significant to adopt the appropriate network protocol. In the on-site production line level control system, PLC is usually the core component and there are a large number of I/O terminals, sensors and actuators as well. Based on the demand of industrial network of the locomotive manufacturing enterprise, it is recommended to use Profinet and EtherCAT protocol considering the status of Siemens in the PLC market and network development situation. However, considering the high real-time synchronization performance requirement of the network among the internal controller, the sensor and the actuator, only EtherCAT protocol is recommended to apply.