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Sunday, August 5, 2007 |
So after Profibus, here's a look at what's happening with the other two dominant fieldbuses. ODVA, home of the CIP networks DeviceNet, ControlNet and EtherNet/IP, is holding its "annual" meeting September 19-20 in Denver. I haven't received a lot of information on that one. Wes Iversen will be covering it for Automation World, so I'll get a "guest blog" from him.
Then I just received word about the next Fieldbus Foundation annual meeting. I want to cover that one--it's in Antwerp, Belgium. But, it'll be chilly. The dates are February 27-29. The theme is "Why Foundation has become THE standard?". With a focus not just on plant performance, the discussion will also include the role of business intelligence as part of a "single, plant-wide solution."
More information from the press release:
The 2008 General Assembly will commence on Wednesday, February 27, with an overview of current Fieldbus Foundation developments across the globe. The presentations for the general program on Wednesday and Thursday, will include end user presentations by industry experts focused on process integrity, open scalable integration, business intelligence, asset management, factory site acceptance testing, commissioning and trouble shooting in the context of the end user's own worldwide Foundation Fieldbus implementation experiences in a wide range of process industry applications.
Supporting demonstrations, vendor visits and question and answer sessions will provide ample opportunity for an active exchange of experiences and insights.
An evening reception for all attendees on the opening day will be highlighted by a keynote address by Dr. Norbert Kuschnerus, President of the NAMUR Board of Management and Senior Vice President - Bayer Technology Services GmbH, Leverkusen, Germany. Dr. Kuschnerus will discuss how end users like Bayer can fully utilise the enabling capabilities of fieldbus technology now and in the future.
On Friday, February 29, the Fieldbus Foundation will conduct its annual business meeting for members only. Non-members are invited to participate in end user training workshops focused on topics including engineering, implementation and maintenance, during which attendees can benefit from expert tuition from Fieldbus Foundation technical personnel with the opportunity for hands-on practical training.
9:59:05 PM 
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A final thought about the Profibus PTO annual general meeting. This meeting isn't really an editorial event. In the past, the organizers of this type of event promote the fact that members can get some time with editors, but often the people who come from the other vendors are not those who interface with us. So, much of the meeting is geared toward getting information about the status and future of the network. (This is about the same modus operandi of the other fieldbuses.)
I'm always impressed that the Profibus people can do competitive analysis without exaggeration or hyperbole. Carl and Mike and the others really try to fairly represent the competitors and the advantages of their networks. (Note: I've had that job in past lives and understand the difficulty of competitive analysis.)
A couple of points. First, looking at the numbers, don't think in terms of a "node war" but in terms that digital networks are pretty much in the mainstream now. ARC's Harry Forbes pointed out that experience has shown that the real benefit seen with these networks is in the diagnostic capability. (The original idea was that the benefit would be cost savings derived from wiring.)
The second note is regarding custom ASICs (note, I didn't say "proprietary"). Proponents of one of the competitive fieldbuses like to say they have "standard, unmodified Ethernet"--with the implicit poke at Profinet (and the motion protocols) that have custom ASICs (rather than commercial Ethernet chips). First, Profinet can run on commercial silicon. The motion application does require silicon for its realtime implementation. All the applications use standard IP, though. Profinet proponents believe strongly that it is better to implement the network in silicon rather than just software. One speaker noted that it is easier for developers to buy the chip and implement Profinet than to implement in software. This is, of course, partly an engineering debate and partly just discussion around the directions two fieldbuses have taken.
9:46:32 PM
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Got a couple of interesting comments on my earlier posting about Rockwell's answer to my programming challenge. Both Dave Harrold and Jarret Campbell pointed to other standardization efforts. If I may speak for Dan and Darrin's point of view (I don't know if they read this blog--the segment marketing manager saw an email blast from AW about the previous podcast and wanted to do a reply one), it is that this is a symptom of the problem. Vertical industry solutions. A different standard for vertical industries may (and that is subject to argument as lines become blurred between industries) help the end users in that industry, but that doesn't do much for OEMs and technology providers who must have solutions for each industry. They were suggesting an ISA-95 approach where the standard would cut across industries into more of a universal standard. Of course, this approach would require someone petitioning ISA to start a new committee. And I just read a quote attributed to Dennis Brandl who said to expect a new standard to take 3-5 years.
This line of thought gives me ideas along the line of Tom Burke, president of the OPC Foundation, who talks about the role of his organization driving toward some interoperability among the many information standards such as ISA-95, MIMOSA, OAGiS and many more. I suppose a technical committee could look at SEMI, JETT, ISA-88, PackML and others and strive for a super set. I'm not volunteering for that one--at least right now.
Oh, and Jarrett, thanks for the tip on recording. Looks like that's just for voice recording, though. For that I use an old iRiver mp3 player. Works very well. But, I need something to record phone calls. There are a lot of solutions for wired land lines. But I am seldom at a place where I can do that. I need something that works with Skype or a Treo. I have a device that works well with land lines (Cell Tap). I thought I had the problem using a mobile phone worked out, but discovered I didn't when I tried to record Dan and Darrin. I have come to the conclusion that my USB ports for my headset while using Skype are buggy. Check out the quality of my last podcast with Dave Bauman. I have other connection problems with them. But the idea made me to make another search of Palm Software. I have done that before and turned up nothing. This time I found a $30 program to play with. Have it on 7 day trial. The first test was positive, so I'll work it out this week and see. It would mean buying a bigger SD card, though. But that's OK.
I was talking with someone last week and told them that Macs are a piece of ****. they laughed and said they'd never heard anyone say that. My last two Windows machines have been as stable as the Mac, and the user interface is similar. Actually, there are a lot of good things about Macs, but Apple's hardware engineering in my opinion leaves a lot to be desired.
7:00:35 PM
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Simon Bretin commented on an M2M post and liked the M2M definition I got from Amit and expanded on. But he adds, "I'll add one point though, is that the Wireless M2M (meaning using GPRS/CDMA/3G) to do that, may not be as trivial as assembling technologies as these communications medium are really different from Ethernet/RTC/ISDN technically and financially speaking! What do you think?"
I think he's right. What do you think?
7:31:32 AM
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I interviewed Darrin Elliott and Dan Seger of Rockwell Automation this morning in relation to the challenge I issued a few times over the past two months about what can be done to help end users who buy machines from many OEMs. The problem for them comes from having many different programming methodologies, visualization strategies terminologies and the like to train, maintain and upgrade. This interview was supposed to be a Podcast, but once again technology failed me. Looks like there is no way for a mobile person with a Mac to do these interviews consistently well. <sigh>
Elliott and Seger agree that standards development is the best way to go. They favor a broad approach to a standard on the order of ISA-95. This standard covers all vertical industries from continuous to batch to discrete. On the other hand, ISA-88, while actually written well enough to cover more industries than intended, still is primarily a standard for batch processing industries. They see OMAC as focused on just one vertical-packaging-and therefore not broad enough to be generally useful. While the end users I talked with were looking for the technology providers to provide leadership and technology for the effort, Rockwell believes that the impetus must come from the end users, themselves. Rockwell is willing, and in fact eager, to help with standards development believing that standards will help it as much as end users and OEMs.
The crucial step in the process is for each of the three guests to this party must define a business case to justify the effort. And it will never work unless the end users (not just one, but a critical mass of them) not only specify any standards that are developed, but actually base buying decisions on them. In other words, don't meet standard, don't get order.
Look for more later.
7:29:23 AM
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© Copyright 2007 Gary Mintchell.
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