1.7 Introduction: Scope of performance

The FDT concept does not claim to provide a solution for all engineering tasks and the associated tools. Therefore, the engineering subjects "electrical wiring planning, mechanical planning, etc." or the plant management subjects such as "maintenance, optimization, archiving, etc." do not form part of the current performance range of FDT. Some of these aspects may be included with future versions of FDT.

The scope of this version of the FDT concept includes the engineering and commissioning of field devices. Functionality for documentation and audit trail support is also considered. Examples and use cases are mainly given for actors, sensors and remote I/Os. Of course, FDT is prepared to be used for devices like drives, analyzers, recorders, etc. as well.

The FDT interfaces are designed in a way to support all significant fieldbus protocols. The main focus of this version of FDT does not lie on any specific fieldbus protocol. Due to the scalable structure of FDT it will be easy to add new schemas in order to extend the scope to new protocols.

The FDT concept allows a device manufacturer to provide his device specific functionality within an engineering system. So the main capacity of FDT depends on the functionality of the devices and the according applications.