Aspects of development and engineering of a migration solution for existing heterogeneous Distributed Automation Systems

The rise of Industrial Ethernet as network technology for Distributed Automation Systems introduces the need for migration strategies from field bus based systems towards this new technology. This paper discusses the problem of acquiring and translating the information needed for the setup of a PROFINET/PROFIBUS proxy as an example for a migration solution. The diverse technologies defined for device information and representation are examined with respect to this task. Furthermore a solution to facilitate the engineering of such a proxy is presented.