hi JL
not only voting of TMR, the safety requirement is to hardwire the field instruments to the PLC subsystem. Triple redundant fiber for remote I/Os and DCs connectivity. That means the field instruments and FE are hardwired.
Modbus uses Ascii and Modbus RTU uses binary and they both are different.However both are master/Slave but cannot coexist on the same network because a network cannot have two masters