Today's industrial process control manufacturing requires state-of-the-art communication networks and a complete understanding of network design, network applications and available network technologies. The network infrastructure becomes the backbone upon which the control system is designed. Therefore, reliable, fault-tolerant network systems are critical to plant operations. Wunderlich-Malec can provide all facets of industrial network design from device-level networks such as Device-Net, Hart, ProfiBus and Foundation Fieldbus, I/O and drive networks such as ControlNet, to the Peer-to-Peer Networks such as Modbus and Ethernet. Our capabilities in network design are wide-ranging and comprehensive:

• Selecting Ethernet network switch hardware
• Designing switch cabling configurations, ensuring cabling distance limitations are not exceeded, and ensuring that best practices of network topologies are followed
• Evaluating and recommending redundancy options based on process risk assessments
• Providing logical and/or physical separation between plant floor process networks and corporate IT networks
• Ensuring that networks are designed for the ability to bridge process networks to the corporate networks for plant floor data collection and MES operations
• Ensuring necessary data throughput on networks by evaluation of node counts, hardware speed, data packet size and analysis tools
• Designing and documenting the network systems in engineered drawing formats, using proprietary drawing blocks and libraries that can be maintained by the end user