Industrial Networking: HART, PROFIBUS, PROFINET & OPC UA

▸ Engineers learn DCS and PLC. Almost nobody is taught how the devices actually talk to each other.

Industrial network faults account for a disproportionate share of process plant downtime, and they are the faults people are worst at diagnosing — because the training does not exist. The person who can work through a comms problem systematically, at three in the morning, is the most valuable one in the control building.

This course teaches the communications layer the way it is built and troubleshot on live plants.

▸ What you will master

• Field device protocols — HART on the installed 4–20 mA base, Foundation Fieldbus and PROFIBUS PA/DP, with the segment design, addressing and termination each demands

• Industrial Ethernet — PROFINET, EtherNet/IP and Modbus TCP, including real-time behaviour, topology and the managed switch features they depend on

• OPC UA — moving plant data securely to historians, MES and the cloud, and why it became the interoperability standard

• Wireless — WirelessHART and ISA100.11a, where each fits and where wireless should not be used

• Fibre and structured cabling — the physical layer where industrial network reliability is usually won or lost

• Segmentation and network architecture — VLANs, redundancy and the security architecture around a control network

• Systematic fault diagnosis — protocol analysis and a repeatable method, which is the difference between resolving a network problem and guessing at it

▸ A worked design example

The course includes a complete network design for a gas processing plant — protocol selection, topology, segmentation and infrastructure, worked end to end. That is the deliverable you will actually be asked to produce.

▸ What you get

• 11 focused lectures across six sections

• 65 PRACTICE QUESTIONS

  Every section ends with a quiz built around realistic scenarios, so you test your understanding as you go and reinforce what you have learned. Each answer comes with a short explanation.

  
  

  Two full course examinations — timed, scored and retakeable

• A complete worked network design example

• Lifetime access, mobile and TV access, and a certificate of completion

• Udemy's 30-day money-back guarantee

▸ Who this is for

C&I, control and automation engineers who design, commission or troubleshoot industrial networks. Commissioning and maintenance technicians resolving faults that cause downtime. OT and IT staff integrating plant data across HART, fieldbus, Ethernet and OPC UA. System integrators configuring PROFINET, EtherNet/IP and Modbus. Electrical and instrument engineers who need to understand how devices communicate. And technical sales engineers at networking and device vendors.

▸ No prior networking background is required — the fundamentals are built from the ground up. Basic familiarity with IP addressing is helpful but not essential, and no software or licence is needed.

Built by a practising engineer with over fifteen years designing and troubleshooting industrial networks on oil, gas and energy projects.

If you want to design industrial networks that stay up — and diagnose them when they do not — this is where to start.