FieldComm recently received the "Best Technology Award" at India's Automation Expo 2017 for its field device integration (FDI) technology standard.

The award judging panel consisted of industry executives and experts and FDI was chosen as the award winner from a pool of more than 500 exhibitors. While announcing the award, Mr. B.R. Mehta, senior vice president of Reliance Industries stated, “In the future we will no longer need to worry about the protocol that we use on the plant floor because FDI will enable simplified integration of all protocols to DCS, asset management, and mobile systems.”

“FDI enables a seamless evolution from existing device description languages to a new standard which adds capability and radically simplifies getting field device data into hosts and the cloud. We are thrilled to receive recognition by a panel of industry executives and experts from the Automation Fair for this exciting new technology”, said Ted Masters, president of FieldComm. “FDI technology is unique in that it dramatically simplifies integration of many field device protocols and exposes information from those protocols in an open and standardized way.”

Automation Expo 2017 Mumbai took place from Aug. 9 to Aug. 12 and drew more than 50,000 attendees. Now in its twleth year, Automation Expo is the largest automation focused exhibition in India with over 500 exhibitors from 25 countries.

FDI’s place in the market has seen many major milestones recently, including:

•     2010 - FDI Specification team included the OPC-UA information model for devices into the FDI architecture
•     April 2015 - FDI selected for Information and Functional layer of Industrie 4.0 Reference Architecture model.
•     July 2015 - First FDI enabled product released.
•     February 2016 - FDI receives NAMUR recommendation (NE 105) as preferred integration technology.
•     January 2017 - FieldComm Group begins registration program for FDI device packages and hosts.
•     3Q 2017 – Release of FDI Technical Specs 1.1 and FDI IDE and Common Host Components 1.2.1