In the same way that the human brain relies on sensory inputs to make sense of the world, today’s increasingly digitalized industrial systems are demanding accurate, reliable, and timely data to help inform decision-making. The upshot is that digitalization is helping to unlock the potential of instrument data to improve productivity, efficiency, and safety.
The quest to get more intelligence out of measuring instruments is not new. The introduction of the HART (Highway Addressable Remote Transducer) protocol in the mid-1980s set the foundation for overlaying a digital signal on a 4-20mA current, allowing more information than just the base process parameter to be obtained from an instrument. When declared as an open protocol, it became the technology of choice for a host of industrial applications worldwide.
Since that time, HART has been joined by a range of other digital communications protocols, including PROFIBUS, Modbus, and FOUNDATION Fieldbus. Each of these offers its own set of benefits with respect to collecting and relaying data, particularly when it comes to simplifying the approaches to resolution, diagnostics, and remote access.
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