Profiles for Fieldbuses - Scope and Description Technologies

After years of distributed protocol specifications the added value for end users in terms of more functionality e.g. for diagnosis and maintenance becomes topic more and more. The question which functions of the field devices can be used in a similar standardized way as communication services is of interest instead of the question, how data are transferred. So the fieldbus organizations offer profiles on top of the communication protocols. The state of the art of specifying profiles is described. In the profile specification the field device is seen as a stand alone component not as part of a distributed control system mostly. This results in high efforts for the integration of field devices in the all over life cycle of the distributed system. Therefore the paper offers an approach, how field devices are reflected as system components during the specification work, and how implementations of devices and tools can be derived from the specification. These specification method is based on the Unified Modeling Language (UML).