System And Method Of Communicating Safety Data Over High Availability Industrial Control Systems

A system for communicating between redundant devices balances the desired attributes of a high availability (HA) control system and a safety control system. The system includes concurrent connections as a fault tolerant mechanism for industrial protocol connections at the transport layer. The concurrent connections establish multiple paths for redundancy from a data producer to a data consumer. Concurrent connections increase availability of the HA control and safety instrumented systems. More specifically, concurrent connections and architectural redundancies eliminate a single point of failure within the control system and further reduce safety connection timeouts during fault detection and/or recovery. Concurrent connections may be used to keep a HA system operational or to provide detection of a failure in a safety system. The industrial control network may be configured to function as a HA control system, as a safety control system, or with certain degrees of both HA and safety-related operation.