Abstract

During the past 30 years, the main focus in the development of field area networks (or fieldbus systems) was on meeting the technical requirements of different application areas, resulting in a wide diversity of systems. Parallel standardization efforts, which still continue, have led to today’s widely accepted conclusion that, in order to successfully cope with the requirements found in the application areas of interest, different coexisting solutions are needed [1]. Also conceived in the past two decades were the technologies that make up today’s Internet, which, ultimately, led to the enormous surge in Internet usage in the 1990s together with the wide adoption of the Internet protocol (IP) family for the use in local area networks (LANs). This exponential growth of the Internet also sparked new interest in vertical communication flows according to the computer-integrated management (CIM) pyramid.