Emerson Profibus Membership is One More Step toward Common Ground - Larry O'Brien

The industry has been talking a lot about Emerson's recent membership in Profibus Nutzerorganisation (PNO), their reason being that they expect to provide improved device integration with their AMS plant asset management application to include drives and other discrete devices supported by Profibus, which has a huge installed base in discrete automation applications (I won't get into node counts or anything here, but it's huge). In fact, Emerson has supported Profibus for some time. The PNO membership officially seals the deal and gives Emerson a hand in future PNO development activities, most importantly the implementation of EDDL or Electronic Device Description Language in future iterations of Profibus. EDDL is a common technology that is shared across the Profibus, Foundation Fieldbus, and HART protocols, and serves essentially as a markup language that describes the characteristics of devices and how data should be stored and displayed. EDDL files are similar to XML files, and are used to describe equipment parameters, such as device status, diagnostic data, and configuration details. EDDL is operating system independent and host system independent.

Emerson's membership in PNO should theoretically speed up enhancements to EDDL that have been made over the past few years. Emerson and Siemens were instrumental in forming the EDDL Cooperation Team (ECT), consisting of members from HART Communication Foundation, Fieldbus Foundation, and PNO all working to develop EDDL and bring the technology forward in a common way. Siemens, a long time member of Fieldbus Foundation, announced support of Foundation Fieldbus in its Simatic PCS 7 control system in 2007. It seems like Profibus, HART, and Fieldbus Foundation are sharing more common ground than ever before. Along with EDDL related activities, there is universal adoption of OPC technology by all three organizations. In 2007, the EDDL Cooperation Team announced that ECT and the OPC Foundation would continue to forge ahead with a joint alliance where OPC would incorporate EDDL as its data model to bring information up from the field level to enterprise level applications. In the future, we will see more and more common ground between these organizations and Emerson's membership in PNO is just further evidence of that.