1 of 33      If we talk about the industrial automation, you might think about fieldbus systems firstly, such as PROFIBUS , INTERBUS , DeviceNet or CANopen , etc. Indeed, the widespread usage of the fieldbus technology has been established in the industrial automation in the past few years. One of the important advantages of the fieldbus systems is that you can migrate from your central automation systems to the decentralized ones. If we talk about the communication between computers, you may be familiar with the intensive data-transferring network like the Internet. The development of this kind of communication mechanisms increased rapidly. Most of the Internet communications are based on the Ethernet standard that was given by IEEE 802.3 (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers). One of the significant properties of the Ethernet is its simple structure. It can be implemented easily and therefore is very popular. PROFINET is the open and innovative standard for the industrial automation based on the industrial Ethernet, i.e. you can exchange the process data with your machines like before but instead of using fieldbus system, you use the Ethernet as a communication mechanism. The concept of the PROFINET satisfies all the requirements for the industrial automation technology. You can use PROFINET for your factory and process automations that require response time under 100 milliseconds. Other applications, like drive technology applications or clock-synchronized Motion Control, can be served with response time up to less than 1 millisecond. For the purpose running safety applications, you can use PROFIsafe , which is the part of PROFINET. The PROFINET technology is developed and published by PROFIBUS Nutzerorganisation e.V. (PNO). It supplements the approved PROFIBUS technology, especially in terms of speediness of data transmission and the use of Information Technology (IT). We will use the IT standards such as TCP/IP and XML to communicate, configure and diagnose the machines or field devices.