Thursday, November 6, 2008

Cincinnati Traveling My wife kept me up late Tuesday--to watch the election returns. She was more into this election than any I remember. (She's happy, by the way. And "a happy wife is a happy life".) We didn't have many on our side where we live. Shelby County Ohio went 67% for McCain. Then I got up early to head to Cincinnati yesterday. Had two great meetings. I stopped off at my old stomping grounds--the engineering area (used to be a quadrangle) at the University of Cincinnati. When I left that place I never thought I'd be back for a meeting with a room full of people with engineering Ph.D.s. I saw Jay Lee and a number of his researchers at the Center for Intelligent Maintenance Systems and got a quick update on their research. The Center's annual meeting falls during Automation Fair week, so I'll miss it. More on our conversation later. I also stopped by to see Chuck Harrel and Mike Berryman at Advantech. Ethernet is the theme there, along with embedded, small HMIs. Those latter products are helping the company expand into new markets--consumer-facing machines. Advantech Corp., a Taiwan-based company, is showing about 15% growth. So things sounded pretty positive there. My excuse for the Cincinnati trip was really the US Women's National Soccer Team v. the women's team from the Republic of Korea. It was a "friendly" so it wasn't as competitive as, say, the match in Columbus will be Saturday. But it was a good game. An old friend and referee mentor got to lead the procession of teams from the tunnel. The fourth official worked with me on my last college games last year. Score was 0-0, but there were many opportunities and all the little girls in the crowd had a good time. I hope they dream the big dream. 5:29:41 PM    comment []

EDDL - FDT Cooperation Many of us were wondering what happened to the joint EDDL Cooperation Team (EDDL, Profibus, FDT Group) that was announced a couple of years ago. In the last six months or so the FDT Group suddenly became very active in promoting its technology, and some of us thought maybe the cooperation was at an end. Fortunately, that is not happening. I just received the same press release from the Hart Communication Foundation (part of the EDDL group) and the FDT Group that reveals some fruits of the cooperation are maturing. The Steering Committee of the EDDL Cooperation Team, in close cooperation with the FDT Group, continues their efforts to achieve a common solution for field device integration. The FDI (Field Device Integration) team has successfully worked over the past 18 months identifying use cases that encompass all facets of plant operations: from startup and commissioning to ongoing maintenance activities and plant operations. This team's efforts also included drafting an architecture concept that meets the needs of both technologies as they are migrated to a common standard.   Both the draft architecture concept and the complete inventory of use case analysis have been completed due to the close cooperation between key global process control suppliers including ABB, Emerson, Invensys, Rockwell, Siemens and Yokogawa. Future efforts will be focused on completing two remaining documents. The first is a functional specification which will detail how the benefits of EDDL, FDT, and the OPC Unified Architecture will be combined. Release of this draft functional specification is planned for February 2009. The second will be a comprehensive technical specification. Look closely at the list of cooperating process control suppliers. There seems to be one missing. I'll see if I can get a statement. 5:19:14 PM    comment []