November 30, 2008
Beginning in the fall of 1998, PI (PROFIBUS & PROFINET International) achieved a milestone in industrial automation with its establishment of PROFIsafe. Impressive proof of this lies in the growth in the number of installed PROFIsafe nodes and systems. The total number of PROFIsafe nodes increased to 410,000 at the end of 2007. For the year 2008, PI again expects growth of the installed base of approximately 80%.
The success of PROFIsafe is based primarily on three advantageous paradigm shifts that led to significant cost savings.
1. With PROFIsafe, it is possible to implement safety functions via PROFIBUS and PROFINET, which are already established in all areas of industrial automation. The usual safety-relevant hardware wiring (