BY PATRICK McLAUGHLIN
ISA-the Instrumentation, Systems, and Automation Society (www.isa.org)-has formed a Field Device Tool (FDT) Interface Specification standards committee, ISA SP103, that will develop a standard to fully integrate fieldbuses, devices and subsystems as seamless parts of the automation lifecycle. The main application domains will be industrial process control and manufacturing execution systems.
“The standard is needed to ensure the consistent management of a plant-wide control and automation technology, focused on lifecycle management,” said Klaus-Peter Lindner, standard and practice board member and interim chair of the committee.
A goal of the standard is to create universal and central plant-wide tooling for the lifecycle management of heterogeneous fieldbus environments, multi-vendor devices and subsystems in process and manufacturing. The standard also aims to develop integrated and consistent lifecycle data of the control system. The committee targets to enact simple but powerful vendor-independent integration of different automation devices and subsystems into lifecycle-management tools, either standalone or as part of a control system.
The standard will define the interfaces for both the vertical and horizontal data flow, called Function Control and Data Access, in the framework of a client-server architecture. It will allow application software and configuration tools to interact with field devices in a unified manner. It will open the manufacturer-specific interaction with devices or subsystems using software modules.
The architecture and interface specification will define the following functions and features.
- A channel-oriented interface for analog and discrete input and output process variables;
- An interface for device or subsystem parameters and diagnosis data;
- An interface for persistent data storage of all instance data;
- A communication interface that allows nested communication over different bus systems;
- A session model that defines the interaction between the software components and the host application using XML-based data exchange.
The standard will allow any field bus, device, or subsystem-specific software tool to be integrated as part of a universal lifecycle management tool of a plant automation system. “As part of ISA’s commitment to the development of global standards for industry, the committee will also be working with and attempting to harmonize their end products with the work of IEC SC65C WG14,” noted Ian Verhappen, ISA vice president of standards and practices.
