ABSTRACT
Fieldbus systems are often evaluated by their technical merits, like performance, efficiency, and suitability for a particular application. Being designed to perform control applications, most industrial communication networks are well capable of performing their respective application tasks. Besides these ostensible criteria, however, there are some other capabilities a fieldbus system must provide, which in some cases might actually have a greater influence on the usability of a particular system than the technical ability to fulfill the given control requirements. These capabilities deal with the configuration and management, i.e., the setup, configuration, monitoring, and maintenance of the fieldbus system.
