Vanderlande talks about PROFINET implementation

During the day PROFIday 2018 numerous parties shared their knowledge about PROFIBUS, PROFINET and IO-Link in the industry. One of the keynotes came from Timo Reumerman, who works at Vanderlande. He talked about the challenges and how to apply PROFINET on a large scale within this company.

The Veghel-based company is known for its complex baggage handling systems that operate at Heathrow London Airport, Hong Kong International Airport and Schiphol, for example. The Brabant company also makes material handling systems for the parcel, postal and warehousing markets.

As an innovator in logistics process automation, Reumerman provided insight into products such as the Posisorter: an advanced sorting system for packages, for which Vanderlande has developed its own hardware that communicates based on PROFINET. PROFIBUS has now been phased out except for the installed base.

Giant sorting machine

Vanderlande is also involved in a huge project for DHL Parcel. A mega sorting center should be built in Zaltbommel that should be able to process half a million packages per day. For this new generation of the CROSSORTER, which will be used for this purpose, Vanderlande has reconsidered how it was going to set up the industrial Ethernet.

The DHL project faces additional challenges, such as a large number of devices, large physical distances, system complexity and the risk of network congestion. To tackle this problem, a fiber optic network with a speed of 1Gbit/s is being installed for the new CROSSORTER. To virtually separate systems from each other and thus increase robustness, multiple VLANs have been included in the design. Using DHCP, devices must be provided with network addresses.

Reumerman also noted a number of trends that tech companies are dealing with when creating new designs. For example, economies of scale ensure high device density and there is an increasing demand for remote access for support matters. Finally, he briefly discussed making choices in the field cabinet design, where the challenges lay in choosing the right components.