Shared Devices Support for Profinet Devices

In a network, several Profinet I/O Controllers may be implemented which can access the same Profinet device if this is supported by the device itself (i.e., defined in the device description). If a Profinet device with shared device support has several I/O modules (slots/subslots) plugged, it is possible to assign these modules to one of the available Profinet Controllers. Each subslots, however, can only be assigned to exactly one controller.

Based on the configuration data in your project, the Profinet I/O Controller establishes the communication relations with the configured Profinet devices. To establish a communication relation between a particular subslots to a different Profinet Controller than the one in your project, you can exclude this subslot in the Profinet configuration of the current project.

In PLCnext Engineer, this exclusion of a submodule must be done in the submodule list of the respective shared Profinet device by setting the 'Active' attribute to 'No'. The Profinet Controller configured in your project only establishes a communication relation to a subslot (module) if 'Active = Yes' is set for it. The same module must then be deactivated for each other Profinet Controller.

By default, all modules of a device with shared device support are activated for the Profinet Controller in your project.

Proceed as follows:

To determine whether a particular device supports the shared device operation:
1. Expand the Profinet device node in the PLANT, and double-click its DAP node (directly under the device node).
2. Open the 'Settings' editor. In the 'Profinet DAP module' category, the parameters of the Device Access Point (DAP) are listed.
  If the 'Shared device supported' checkbox appears marked here, the device can be shared by several Profinet Controllers.
Example...
Perform the following steps for each I/O module under the Profinet device:
- Double-click the I/O module and open its 'Submodule List' editor.
- Set the 'Active' attribute to 'No' if this subslot is addressed by another Profinet controller in the network.
  Set the 'Active' attribute to 'Yes' if you want to use this subslot in the current project.
  ('Yes' is the default setting after inserting an I/O module into the project.)
Example...

Note
If a subslot is activated by mistake for more than one Profinet Controller, the device will report an error when the controller in your project tries to establish a communication relation to the already connected module. For the deactivated modules, no communication relation is established and the start-up parameterization is not initialized. This is to be done by the Profinet controller for which these modules are defined to the active.