FDI/FDT Interoperability Solution

Customer
CodeWrights GmbH is a German company specializing in device integration and management software development. Founded in 2002, CodeWrights keeps its leading position on the market providing clients in the process industries (vendors of instrumentation and control systems, as well as plant operators) with reliable device communication solutions.

Challenge
Such standards as EDDL, FDT and FDI came into a wide use to ensure that devices and control systems work well together in industrial networks. Equipment and control system manufacturers can use different technologies for configuration, parameterization and operation, which lead to a interoperability issues between products from different vendors.

To address this problem, the Customer was developing one of its flagship products enabling interoperability between FDI device drivers and the FDT Frames in use. To help them bring out the iDTM Manager, a tool for managing this system, the Customer turned to Applied Systems in search of a partner to complement their expertise in data, protocols and devices.

The project was to be completed by the time of the solution’s demonstration at the expo. Another requirement was a close collaboration between the partner and the Customer’s team developing the product’s core functionality.

Solution
To facilitate requirements approval, Applied Systems’ design team in close cooperation with the Customer came up with the tool’s overall style and user interface prototype, as the tool’s look and feel was one of the project’s priorities. At the same time, prior to starting the development phase, the project collaboration tools and processes were thoroughly outlined.

Over the course of several sprints, Applied Systems delivered the functionality allows to use FDI Device Packages in FDT frame application and manage FDI Device Packages.

For the core development tasks, the team used .NET WPF and Dapper ORM, LightInject, MSpec frameworks. The database was supported with SQLite; automated tests were run for all the scenarios.

Results
As a result, CodeWright became the first vendor to offer a completely new solution for integrating existing FDI packages into FDT-based control systems.

Applied Systems’ team delivered iDTM Manager on time and on budget, successfully accommodating the Customer’s changes to the initial product specification. Upon the project completion, the software was transferred to the Customer’s maintenance team.