POWERLINK has been adopted by the IEEE under international standard IEEE 61158. It is the only Industrial Ethernet protocol to achieve this status. The IEEE views its standards for TSN and POWERLINK as core components for real-time industrial communication.
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is the world’s largest professional association in its field. Among its most prominent accomplishments is the IEEE 802.3 standard commonly known as Ethernet.
The IEEE’s industrial real-time communication working group has been working for the past two years on the definition of an Industrial Ethernet standard. In March 2017 POWERLINK was adopted as the sole IEEE standard with 97% of the vote.
“Real-time industrial communication had previously been a gap for the IEEE,” explained Dr. Victor Huang, responsible for standardization at the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society (IES) following the vote. “With its combination of high performance and unrestricted openness, POWERLINK is the perfect complement to the other IEEE communication standards.” “The adoption of POWERLINK as an IEEE standard is an important step toward standardizing industrial automation technology at the field level,” added Prof. Aleksander Malinowski, IEEE Industrial Electronics Society (IES) Senior AdCom Member.
EPSG MD Stefan Schönegger sees great potential for POWERLINK as an IEEE standard, particularly in combination with another IEEE-development: TSN technology. “In every aspect of global industry, openness has a way of winning out.”