PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF THE STANDARD PROWAY NETWORK FOR PROCESS-CONTROL

A sort of informal and formal standardization process is now under development in order to obtain 'standard' technologies which can be efficiently used for the networking of given distributed applications. An example of this trend in the Proway architecture, which is being developed by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) to obtain a local area network (LAN) for industrial process control. A performance evaluation of the Proway network involving simulation approach is discussed. The service quality offered by the Proway is shown, as is an automated method to study the performances of a wide class of distributed systems. The results show that low service time and high throughput are not consistent, so that, during the design of the network, it is necessary to choose what feature is more important for the considered application.