Mr. Schönegger, what insights have you already gained from your involvement in the IIC testbed and your work in the OPC Foundation's real-time working group?
■ It is generally impressive at the moment how the pace of automation is increasing. Broken down to the activities mentioned, it is the speed of work and the spirit of the various working groups in the OPC Foundation that I find very pleasing. This also applies to the environment of the IEEE802 committees: The discussions are at the highest level and the benefits for the customer are always at the forefront. To date, political battles of interest have been completely ignored.

The real-time Ethernet variant TSN is increasingly being discussed as a possible communication standard in factory automation - especially in conjunction with OPC UA, even down to the controllers. How soon do you expect the first real implementations?
■ OPC UA definitely plays a key role here. Our controllers already have OPC UA servers and clients on board across all performance classes, without exception. We also presented a direct OPC UA solution for our X20 I/O system at this year's Hannover Messe. We expect the first OPC UA products with TSN extension before the end of this year. In line with the market trend, only controllers with integrated OPC UA will be accepted on the market in the near future.

How do you view the idea, which has been widely discussed in the industry, of spanning the protocols of established Ethernet fieldbuses onto an underlying TSN layer?
■ In my view, this makes no sense and will not become established! OPC UA is an open standard that is also technically superior and enables an end-to-end solution from the sensor to the cloud. In fact, the market has already opted for OPC UA. A fieldbus-based approach in parallel to OPC UA is of no benefit to the customer and will therefore not prevail. We assume that the large end users or plant operators will not accept this either - they would suffer the most!

For which products at B&R do you envisage OPC UA plus TSN?
■ We will gradually expand all OPC UA products - such as our controllers and the I/O system - to include TSN.

TTTech says that cycle times down to 10 µs can be achieved with TSN. That would be significantly faster than the current benchmark achieved by Profinet-IRT, Powerlink, Sercos or Ethercat. Isn't it foreseeable that the time of fieldbus-driven networking variants is coming to an end due to the expected high quantities of TSN chips alone?
■ TSN is of course an exciting technology for the future. How far it can conquer the global market or the established manufacturers remains to be seen.

What cycle times are you already achieving with the connections you are developing?
■ We don't have any results on this yet, but we are optimistic that we will achieve exciting values.

Are you also planning to equip your drives with TSN and thus move into the traditional sphere of fieldbuses?
■ We don't see any need for our drives, as we can offer our customers a very powerful and mature solution here with Powerlink. Thanks to our close collaboration with the OPC Foundation, we have already created a perfect integration of OPC UA in Powerlink. For line communication, however, it is already clear that OPC UA TSN will be the leading technology. And that too is already a traditional sphere of the established fieldbuses.