OPC DX and industrial Ethernet glues fieldbus together

With our hope of having one world standard for fieldbus being dashed to the ground, new technology of OPC data exchange (DX) and industrial Ethernet emerge, as the times require. The advantages of Ethernet, such as great bandwidth, resourceful hardware and software, potential of durative development and especially based on open IEEE Std 802.3, are porting the traditional fieldbus architectures to industrial Ethernet. Finding industrial Ethernet´s proper place among the fieldbus and its limitation using Ethernet to the manufactory floor is analyzed in detail. OPC DX, defining a set of interfaces that can be used to remotely configure and manage the connections maintained by each OPC DX server, provides application interoperability between disparate fieldbuses. By analyzing an application example in process control using both industrial Ethernet and OPC DX in detail, this paper presents that OPC DX and industrial Ethernet would complement each other rather than replace, and they would exit in parallel for a long time. With the development of OPC DX and industrial Ethernet, they must bring an end to the dispute among fieldbus.