HMS Anybus .NET gateways

HMS Industrial Networks has introduced a gateway range for the Industrial Internet of Things. The Anybus .NET gateways enable real-time data from industrial machinery to be presented to .NET-based IT applications. This means that .NET programmers can get data directly from a PLC system on the other side of the gateway for use in applications for statistics, analysis or maintenance. The first .NET gateways released support Profibus and Profinet.

The basic prerequisite for Industrial IoT is that industrial applications are able to communicate with IT systems. However, the operational technology (OT) on the factory floor uses fieldbus and industrial ethernet networks, which are designed for real-time communication — by default separated from the IT infrastructure. The gateways address this situation by acting as translators that send and receive data between Profibus or Profinet networks and IT platforms using .NET as a framework.

The result is that IT systems get unprecedented access to real-time data from the factory floor, which enables predictive maintenance, KPI follow-up, machine analytics, data mining, big data processing and production statistics without interfering with the industrial processes.

The information exchange between the OT side and the IT side is defined in a spreadsheet template that defines how the data is mapped, tagged and presented to IT applications. The spreadsheet is uploaded to the HMS code generator, which automatically creates a customised high-level C# API that is easy to integrate directly into a .NET application. It also generates a customised GSDML file for the PLC.