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Use of advanced communication technologies, highly integrated control, and programming platforms drastically increases the performance of industrial control systems. That is the case of Motronic, where the synergistic collaboration between industry and academia has led to an advanced distributed network control system. To be commercially successful, it needs to have a low cost and to be robust, even if this requirement implies that it is a custom design and not based on previously existing commercial solutions. Use of standards and off-the-shelf products lower development costs, but usually raise production costs. In this paper, we show that, in certain applications, design of a new system from scratch is more advantageous. This system comprises a set of dynamically reconfigurable local controller nodes, a graphical programming environment, a remote supervision and control system, and a fault-tolerant fiber …