At a press conference at Hannover Fair 2013, ODVA issued several announcements, including technical work with the FDT Group and the formation of a new special interest group.
ODVA and the FDT Group announced that technical work is now underway to develop an annex to the FDT2 specification for ODVA’s family of CIP networks. The new annex will ensure that support for an FDT-compatible Device Type Manager is possible for users of EtherNet/IP, DeviceNet, CompoNet and ControlNet who are also using the updates and enhancements to the FDT technology that are included in FDT2.
The FDT technology standardizes the configuration interface between field devices and host systems independent of the communication protocol used to transmit the data between them, allowing access to device parameters for applications where extensive device configuration might be needed.
ODVA’s CIP technology encompasses a comprehensive suite of services for industrial automation applications, including control, safety, energy, synchronization, motion, information and network management. When FDT is used in combination with CIP and its network adaptations, the resulting system provides users with a feature-rich interoperable environment for configuration, command and control.
ODVA also announced that it will form a special interest group (SIG) for machine information to develop standards for the exchange of information between machines, and between machines and supervisory systems. The resulting standards will provide data models and network services to optimize the exchange of machine information for purposes such as production, energy or condition monitoring, business intelligence, batch and recipe management, and multi-machine line control.
The formation of the SIG is one outgrowth of ODVA’s machinery initiative, which is aimed at the optimization of machine integration (OMI). The major focus of the SIG will be the development of data models for logical grouping of machine attributes along with services necessary for exchange of data between machines and other machines or supervisory systems. To simplify communication between heterogeneous systems using EtherNet/IP and CIP, sercos III and/or OPC UA, whenever possible the approach will be to adopt protocol-neutral data models, which can be adapted to any of the three technologies.
