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ODVA has announced enhancements to the CIP Safety on EtherNet/IP technology, enabling the use of Concurrent Connections for applications requiring both high availability and functional safety. This enhancement allows communication redundancy between multiple producing and consuming devices, helping to provide additional reliability of critical automation processes. CIP Safety helps to ensure fail-safe communication between nodes such as safety I/O blocks, safety interlock switches, safety light curtains, and safety controllers in both machine and process safety applications. It supports safety levels up to Safety Integrity Level (SIL) 3, as per IEC 61508 standards. With Concurrent Connections, users can achieve redundancy alongside functional safety, helping to enhance uptime and worker safety.
Concurrent Connections are CIP connections designed to tolerate faults by using redundant devices. They establish multiple communication paths, allowing data to be transmitted redundantly between producing and consuming devices. This redundancy operates independently of the devices’ physical interconnections. Multiple originators, routers, and targets can participate, helping to ensure more seamless failover when devices or paths experience an issue. Data is continuously sent and received by redundant pairs, allowing uninterrupted operation in the event of a failure, thus helping to reduce detection time and switching delays.
CIP Safety mitigates risks of hazardous errors, as defined in IEC 61784-3-2, through mechanisms such as:
Time stamps to help detect lost, delayed, repeated, or out-of-order packets.
Unique device identifiers for authenticating communication between safety devices.
Diagnostics and checks to validate message integrity during transmission.
When these mitigation techniques are combined within CIP Safety, a single connection between two devices, whether wired or wireless, can enable communications certified up to SIL 3 according to IEC 61508 and up to Category 4/PLe as specified by ISO 13849-1.
Previously, CIP Safety and Concurrent Connections were available separately to provide redundancy and functional safety in industrial networks. The integration of Concurrent Connections with CIP Safety combines these benefits, offering automation designers a tool for ensuring system availability without compromising safety integrity.