ODVA held its 21st Annual Meeting of Members in San Diego, California, USA on March 10, 2022. With over 85 industry professionals from 30 companies in attendance, highlights of the Annual Meeting included a keynote on the future of the field instrumentation layer in process automation by Paul R. Maurath, Ph.D., Technical Director – Process Automation, The Procter & Gamble Company; perspectives from the ARC Advisory Group analyst Harry Forbes on the next decade of industrial automation; and an update from the organization’s leadership on both the accomplishments and future initiatives for ODVA as a whole. The ability to meet in person, with appropriate safety precautions, helped to accelerate the diffusion of new ideas as well as to drive progress on existing initiatives to further enhance EtherNet/IP™.

The Annual Meeting capped a week of technical sessions offered through ODVA’s 2022 Industry Conference. The latest developments in ODVA technologies and applications were highlighted at the conference, including IEC61784-3 Edition 4 certification of CIP SafetyTM, xDSTM device description development, Single Pair Ethernet and Ethernet-APL™ advancements, TSN for EtherNet/IP preparation, continued CIP SecurityTM expansion with the CIPTM Authorization Profile, and CIP to OPC UA Cloud connectivity progress.

ODVA has been continuously improving the EtherNet/IP network to stay ahead of critical trends such as Industry 4.0, IIoT, safety, security, and interoperability. Recent achievements include the extension of EtherNet/IP networks to in-cabinet resource-constrained devices such as contactors and push-buttons. To align, CIP Security has also been streamlined for resource-constrained devices as an essential step in securing the edge. Additionally, CIP Security has been updated to support user-level authentication with a narrow trust domain by user and role. ODVA has also launched a joint working group with the OPC Foundation to develop an OPC UA companion specification to the Common Industrial Protocol (CIP). Furthermore, EtherNet/IP networks can now support the Ethernet-APL physical layer for process automation. To give end-users the greatest flexibility with their installations, ODVA has also entered into separate agreements to further integrate FDT and FDI technologies into EtherNet/IP. Additional device description work on the next generation xDS™ for CIP devices continues to move forward as well.

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