Managing Industrie 4.0 communication networks

Siemens is launch­ing Sinec NMS, a pow­er­ful, future-proof net­work man­age­ment sys­tem (NMS). It enables users to mas­ter the grow­ing demands placed upon indus­tri­al com­mu­ni­ca­tion net­works, such as the increas­ing degree of net­work­ing, larg­er quan­ti­ties of data, and the com­plex­i­ty of net­work struc­tures. Net­works with between 50 and 12,500 par­tic­i­pants can be cen­tral­ly con­fig­ured, man­aged and mon­i­tored round-the-clock with the soft­ware. This facil­i­tates for­ward-look­ing plan­ning and a quick response time to pre­vent pos­si­ble fail­ures and so increase pro­duc­tiv­i­ty. The soft­ware can be used across all industries.
Sinec NMS gives users an extreme­ly high degree of trans­paren­cy through­out the entire archi­tec­ture of an indus­tri­al net­work. New com­po­nents can be eas­i­ly inte­grat­ed into the net­work, and exist­ing devices can be con­tin­u­al­ly con­fig­ured and main­tained. Net­work com­po­nents are con­fig­ured accord­ing to rules, that is to say based on defined rules referred to as “poli­cies”, which are applied across a spe­cif­ic range of com­po­nents. For exam­ple, users can eas­i­ly change the pass­words required to access the devices. This saves a great deal of time dur­ing the con­fig­u­ra­tion of net­work par­tic­i­pants and dur­ing trou­bleshoot­ing, espe­cial­ly in large net­works with a large num­ber of devices.
The dis­trib­uted approach of the NMS makes it easy to adapt flex­i­bly to the require­ments of all types of plant net­works. In order to man­age large net­works, the sys­tem is divid­ed into the two lev­els con­trol and oper­a­tion. Con­trol is the cen­tral instance in Sinec NMS; it dis­plays the over­all state of the net­work quick­ly and clear­ly. Oper­a­tions are also man­aged there. The oper­a­tions them­selves are dis­trib­uted through­out the net­work, and imple­ment the con­fig­u­ra­tion spec­i­fi­ca­tions from the con­trol on all the devices.
As a mod­ern net­work man­age­ment sys­tem (NMS), Sinec NMS cov­ers all five cor­ner­stones of the FCAPS mod­el defined by ISO (Inter­na­tion­al Orga­ni­za­tion for Stan­dard­iza­tion). First­ly, “fault man­age­ment” for locat­ing faults quick­ly and eas­i­ly. Sec­ond­ly, “con­fig­u­ra­tion man­age­ment” to save time and mon­ey through cen­tral con­fig­u­ra­tion and main­te­nance of the entire net­work. Third­ly, “account­ing man­age­ment” for secu­ri­ty by test­ing the net­work and doc­u­ment­ing events reli­ably. Fourth­ly, “per­for­mance man­age­ment” for flex­i­bil­i­ty by opti­miz­ing the net­work, trans­paren­cy by gen­er­at­ing sta­tis­tics, and high avail­abil­i­ty by con­tin­u­ous­ly mon­i­tor­ing the net­work. Fifth­ly, “secu­ri­ty man­age­ment” for greater net­work security