Wickliffe, O. - To help harmonize competing fieldbus and Ethernet-based communication protocols, ABB announced April 29 that it will support efforts by the OPC Foundation to create an industry-wide standard for those protocols.
Wickliffe, O. – To help harmonize competing fieldbus and Ethernet-based communication protocols, ABB announced April 29 that it will support efforts by the OPC Foundation to create an industry-wide standard for those protocols. The foundation’s OPC Data Exchange (DX) specification reportedly provides the standard communication language needed to unite these protocols for uniform access to control network data.
Consequently, the OPC DX Ethernet standard is expected to unite many previously competing fieldbus and Ethernet-based protocols. The OPC DX working group that agreed to support this initiative includes ControlNet International, Fieldbus Foundation, Open DeviceNet Vendor Association (ODVA) and Profibus International. As an active member of the working group, ABB is contributing to the efforts to promote and implement this standard, and it also plans to incorporate the new standard into its future IndustrialITofferings.
“This new standard will make it easier for manufacturing customers to exchange data among many systems and devices that use different protocols. This ease of enterprise-wide information access and exchange is a cornerstone benefit we offer with our IndustrialITtechnology and products,” says Hans Holmstrom, IndustrialITbusiness unit vp in ABB’s Automation Technology Products Division. “The widespread implementation of this standard can help us to continue to provide that access in our upcoming products by providing an easy way to unite legacy third party systems and devices that previously depended on an odd assortment of protocols to communicate data.”
Control Engineering Daily News Desk
Jim Montague, news editor
[email protected]
