Communication and information engineering of FDI equipment packages

This paper proposes a concept to extend Field Device Integration (FDI) to address equipment which has no dedicated communication interfaces. An FDI equipment package knows the relevant field devices and algorithms that are necessary for diagnosis, condition monitoring and other plant asset management activities. FDI Equipment packages do not need any specific distributed control system support; given the current FDI draft however an additional software component is necessary which uses the standard interfaces of the FDI server. The proposed concept enables equipment vendors and process specialists to deliver FDI Equipment packages that run in every automation architecture that supports FDI. The run-time concept is complemented by engineering workflows and algorithms that automate the assignment of field devices and parameterization of the FDI equipment packages from formal plant engineering data.