Experimental analysis of outage times for PROFIBUS networks

Distributed control systems operation strongly depends on the communication system performance. Therefore, their analysis becomes an important aspect to be considered, particularly in situations where communications have real-time constrains and the network operates on faulty environments. In this paper the behavior of PROFIBUS network in the pres-ence of faults is analyzed. This analysis is performed in an expe-rimental base supported by a real network. The network opera-tion is disturbed through a set of fault injection experiments from which performance metrics related with PROFIBUS out-age times are evaluated