Industrial Automation Standards Convergence or Divergence?

Summary

Can another standards war be avoided with exciting new industrial multivendor interoperability and plug and play standards? There are a growing number of standards to support industrial digitalization, and hopefully the industry is mature enough to avoid the “fieldbus wars” of the 1990s with the proliferation of multiple industrial network standards that created divergence rather than convergence. 

Has the industrial automation industry matured to avoid a standards war similar to 1990s “Fieldbus Wars”?

History

Standard fieldbus networks started to appear in the 1990s and led to a proliferation of standards termed the “fieldbus wars." During this time there were over 20 industrial network standards leading people to observe, “standards are great everyone has their own.” It has taken a long time for convergence to a handful of mainstream industrial network standards and most recently on using ethernet but with distinct industrial protocols including EtherNet/IP, Profinet, and EtherCAT so native multivendor interoperability is still not possible. The developing OPC Foundation FLC has the potential to solve this issue for users.

Native multivendor industrial networking still not possible

Industrial automation continues to lag the computing industry that went through this transition much earlier after long-running debates in computer science known also as the Protocol Wars from the 1970s to the 1990s when engineers, organizations and nations became polarized over the issue of which communication protocol would result in the best and most robust computer networks. Early networks successfully connected computers, but different kinds of networks couldn’t link to each other creating a hodge-podge of vendor solutions including Novell Netware, IBM SNA, DECnet, and AppleTalk. The development of a complete Internet protocol suite by 1989, and partnerships with the telecommunication and computer industry to incorporate TCP/IP throughout the computer industry achieved multivendor interoperability which has accelerated computing and Internet adoption for a broad range of applications.

Plug and Play (PnP)

Industrial automation and controls have not yet achieved multivendor Plug and Play (PnP) that we all enjoy with our computer systems since the 1990s. Today you simply plug-in devices from any vendor into your computer system and it automatically works without having to do any special programming or configuration including printers, USBs, networks, disk drives, keyboards, video cameras, game pads and virtual reality headsets. The computer automatically recognizes the device, loads new drivers for the hardware if needed, and begins to work with the newly connected device.

Perspective

During the 2022 Hannover Messe trade fair October 2021 press conference Dr. Gunther Kegel, CEO of Pepperl+Fuchs, Vice President VDE [ https://www.vde.com/en ], and ZVEI [ https://www.zvei.org/en/  ] President  discussed the importance of standards and semantic data models to achieve Industry 4.0/Industrial digitalization and expressed concern of about the proliferation of multiple competing standards.

Future

Encouraging is the collaboration between many organizations including OPC Foundation, NAMUR, ECLASS Association VDE, ZVEI and CESMII.

A great example is the OPC Foundation & ECLASS Collaboration for M2M Interoperability.  The goal of this is to combine the power of the OPC UA and ECLASS (formerly eCl@ss) standards to better enable M2M interoperability via seamless communication of data and semantics using a standardized set of interfaces. To serve as the basis for semantic interoperability across full product life cycles in an international application environment, a manufacturer and industry independent standard for product description.

Users are getting more involved with standards and semantic data model development because it is essential to achieve Industry 4.0/Industrial digitalization to remain competitive and profitable.