Rockwell Automation Technologies Incorporated

Armand J Craig

Timothy C Mirth

Stephen A Wenner

Eric Eilberg

Nicholas R Garcias

To facilitate redundancy in a distributed control system architecture used in an industrial automation environment, a user workstation is connected to multiple enterprise access switches. Separate physical connections established between an application server and the enterprise access switches are configured into a single virtual interface for the application server to provide physical media redundancy between the application server and the enterprise access switches. Redundancy switches are connected to the enterprise access switches and to a first LAN and a second LAN, and are assigned unique IP addresses but communicate using a same default gateway IP address to serve as redundant default gateways. The redundancy switches are configured with a redundancy protocol that enables transmission of duplicate data packets over the first LAN and the second LAN. Redundant industrial controllers are connected to both the first LAN and the second LAN, wherein the redundant industrial controllers utilize non-swapping IP addresses.

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Kent, OH, United States of America

Armand J Craig