The need for such a standard had been recognized by the IEC quite early, when the first fieldbus developments started. In 1985, the technical subcommittee SC65C started the fieldbus project, which had the ambitious objective of creating one single universally accepted fieldbus standard for factory and process automation based on—by that time the most promising—two approaches, namely, PROcess FIeld BUS (PROFIBUS) and Factory Instrumentation Protocol (FIP) [8], [12].