Brooks and Birkhofer replaced board members Lee Lane, Rockwell Automation, and Francois Ichtertz, Endress+Hauser, respectively, due to their departure to new roles. They join existing board members including Andre Uhl, Schneider Electric; Michael Kessler, PACTware; Shinji Oda, Yokogawa; and Ed Silva, Flowserve.
Brooks has more than 30 years of experience in the industrial market and currently leads the commercial and technical teams responsible for the strategy around open aspects of the Rockwell Automation System Architecture. This includes Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture (OPC UA) and Field Xchange (FX) strategy, EtherNet/IP development, network architecture, 5G direction and application orchestration. He was a member of FDT Joint Interest Group (JIG) in 2003.
Birkhofer’s near 20-year career in industrial automation stems from his electrical engineering background and managing director roles at CodeWrights and Endress+Hauser. He oversees digital solutions for process applications at Endress+Hauser and is involved with technology standards groups including Advanced Physical Layer (APL), Device Descriptions (DD), Field Device Integration (FDI) and Field Device Tool / Device Type Manager (FDT/DTM).
The primary purpose of the FDT Group is to provide an open standard for enterprise-wide network and asset integration. The FDT standard is globally adopted by IEC 62453, ISA 103 and GB-T 29618-2017.