General information of FDT2 and FDI

FDT2™ and FDI are both the latest field device integration technologies. FDT2 is enhanced specification from original FDT 1.2 specification, which defines interfaces between device application and host application. A DTM is device application that has FDT interfaces to work together with a host application called FDT Frame Application. FDI is based on EDDL technology, a scripting language technology to represent device model. A device application can be described in EDDL for its device profiles such as device parameters, simple methods and business logics in plain text format. FDI added an extension to support programmed user interface where EDDL is not enough to provide such functions and presentations. FDI adopted device information model defined in OPC-UA, so that FDI client can access device model in the FDI server in the uniform way. The programmed user interface is defined in FDI as user interface plug-in (UIP) where some of host interfaces are derived from FDT2 specification. EDDL descriptive application and optional UIP are packed into a single file entity as FDI device package, which will be consumed by FDI host application. The UIP interfaces of FDI and FDT2 interfaces use the same implementation technology of Microsoft's .NET common language infrastructure. Some of UIP hosting interfaces are identical to FDT2. A DTM of FDT2 is a container of device application. A small FDI host application that consumes FDI device package is also a kind of device application and it can be wrapped into a DTM. Such DTM will be hosted by FDT2 Frame Application and execute device application provided with FDI device package. FDT2 Frame Application can host not only DTMs but also FDI device package using respective supporting DTM. Existing FDT2 application promises users to use continuously FDT and FDI both technologies without changing existing environment and user's investment is protected even FDI device package is introduced. This paper introduces the general information of these technologies and how the both technologies work together.