The WorldFIP Fieldbus
Abstract
This chapter is dedicated to the study of the WorldFIP Fieldbus. It is one of the first fieldbuses, born in France at the beginning of the 80's in a working group between academic and end users representatives. This novel fieldbus has been at the origin of several main concepts well-suited for distributed real time systems, which are now implemented in different, other fieldbuses. For example, the Producer-Consumer model, the timeliness attributes to qualify the validity of a data, the time coherence and consistency attributes, are some of the most important WorldFIP contributions. WorldFIP is today used in a lot of applications domains, but it is essential in all the applications, which require hard real time constraints and high dependability (trains, nuclear power plant, control of electrical motor, traffic monitoring, CERN large Collider). It is the only fieldbus proven in use according to the IEC 61506 Standard.