Neutral data access to fieldbuses in process industries

In recent years, an increasing spread of fieldbus instrumentation can be noticed in process industries. In this domain, an important part of the instrumentation consists of rather complex ("intelligent") devices which are capable of revealing useful new data about the processes they are attached to, and of their own operational state. However, developing new applications deploying this additional information is cumbersome: different communication hardware, a variety of fieldbus protocols, and the limited applicability of existing fieldbus software and tools put application development at risk. Starting from an analysis of the potential and requirements on fieldbus installations in the process industries, we introduce a design and implementation of an application platform. It represents information from fieldbus devices in a structured manner, so that arbitrary applications can access and manipulate this information independently from the concrete underlying fieldbus and interface hardware.