ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the experiment results using the developed real-time wireless highway addressable remote transducer (WirelessHART) hardware-in-the-loop simulator (WH-HILS) where actual wireless gateway and five nodes are used. The self-optimization functionality is another important adaptability feature of WirelessHART which makes it suitable for industrial applications. The process plants used in the experiment are industrial-rated, thus the surrounding environment is close to industrial environment, except that the laboratory is maintained at a temperature of around 22°C according to the university's laboratory rules. This is to extend the lifetime of the laboratory equipment for educational purposes. When the process plants are in operation, the wireless communication of the network is affected mostly at the communication between the surrounding nodes. In addition, the self-organizing and self-healing characteristics of WirelessHART were demonstrated through the change in mesh topology during the experiment. The experiment with the WH-HILS was conducted over a period of six hours for assessing plants' control performance using real-time measured delays.
