by Gary Mintchell | Jun 30, 2021 | Automation, News, Organizations, Standards, Technology
The Open Process Automation Forum has made progress over the past few years. You can see a chain of reports and thoughts I’ve written over that time. These ideas remind me of a phrase we had amongst the graduate assistants when I was in grad school (we were all political philosophy majors), “Operationalize your eschaton!” In other words of Wendy’s restaurants, “Where’s the beef?” Is anything practical going to evolve from all this standards work?
Then an organization called “Coalition for Open Process Automation” contacted me with information about its formation, members, and, best of all, certified products. This is a giant step forward. Check out the press release and website.
The Coalition for Open Process Automation (COPA) is pleased to announce the launch of COPA QuickStart to accelerate the adoption of Industrial Control Systems (ICS). This is aligned with The Open Group O-PAS Standard, a “standards of standards” for industrial process automation developed by the Open Process Automation Forum (OPAF).
COPA is a diverse group of leading IT and OT technology companies, led by innovative newcomers Collaborative Systems Integration of Austin, Texas and CPLANE.ai of Silicon Valley, California. Its partners include veteran industry leaders such as Phoenix Contact, R. Stahl, Supermicro, Nova SMAR, and CODESYS. With the release of COPA QuickStart, the Coalition is applying years of research, collaboration, and investment by members of OPAF to bring ICS systems to market that are built on industry standards for open, secure, and interoperable architectures.
Securing ICS’s from ransomware attacks and state-sponsored hacking is now one of the top priorities of governments and corporations. These cybersecurity issues along with outdated and crumbling infrastructure adds to the imperative to increase value generation and reduce total cost of ownership through digital transformation. The first step in digital transformation for industrial manufactures is Open Process Automation.
The COPA partner companies have engineered COPA QuickStart to incorporate components and technologies from multiple vendors into a single, advanced, and cohesive ICS. The COPA QuickStart system is the catalyst for industrial manufacturers to accelerate their adoption of state-of-the-art ICS systems that greatly improve security, flexibility, and profitability of their operations.
Industrial manufacturers can no longer take a “wait and see” approach to adopting modern and open control systems into their manufacturing operations. Until now, there have been no open control system products available for companies to buy. The COPA QuickStart system provides the critical first step in helping industrial manufacturers to start learning, proving, and adopting open architecture ICS solutions into their operations.
Don Bartusiak, who is known widely as the “Father of Open Process Automation,” previously served as ExxonMobil’s Chief Engineer for Process Control. He said, “industrial manufacturers have repeatedly told me that if O-PAS Standard aligned systems were available, they would buy them. The COPA QuickStart system is our answer to that challenge.” Dr. Bartusiak’s company, Collaborative Systems Integration (CSI) is the systems integrator for the COPA QuickStart offering.
The COPA QuickStart system is designed to accelerate the innovation efforts of leading industrial manufacturers, allowing them to realize the benefits of open systems sooner. The system includes:
A pre-packaged industrial control system, aligned with the O-PAS Standard and carefully engineered with best-of-breed components from Phoenix Contact, R. Stahl, Nova SMAR, Supermicro, CPLANE.ai, CSI, and CODESYS.
CPLANE.ai’s Fusion management software for seamless automation and orchestration across the entire life-cycle of an industrial control system from startup to operate to evolve. CPLANE.ai Fusion leverages capabilities engineered by Intel and is powered by Intel Edge Controls for Industrial.
The Advanced Computing Platform, built by Supermicro and powered by Intel Xeon D processors installed in a versatile short-depth 1U chassis.
Advanced digital technologies demonstrating the value of new capabilities such as fast-cycle Model Predictive Control, Reinforcement Learning Control, AI, and advanced cybersecurity.
Hands-on training modules allowing engineers and executives to rapidly gain a deeper understanding of the next-generation control systems and the value they can deliver.
“Powered by Intel Atom x6000E series and Intel Pentium and Celeron N and J series processors with the Intel Edge Controls for Industrial software, the COPA QuickStart will help accelerate the adoption of OPAF-based control systems,“ said Richard Kerslake, General Manager of Industrial Controls and Robotics at Intel.
Steve Nunn, CEO and President, The Open Group said: “Through defining and promoting Open Process Automation™, OPAF and COPA are united by a common goal of helping industrial manufacturers accelerate their digital transformation initiatives. The launch of COPA QuickStart coupled with new developments to the O-PAS Standard represents a key milestone in the creation of open, secure, and interoperable architectures, which are critical to the future of industrial process automation systems. We are looking forward to continue working with COPA to address industry challenges and drive progress in process automation.”
“COPA QuickStart is the fruit of many years of collaboration by OPAF and COPA members. It is exciting to see the first, standards based open system become commercially available. Open Process Automation is the future, and we are excited to be a catalyst to accelerate that transformation,” shared Bob Hagenau, CEO, CPLANE.ai
First availability of COPA QuickStart system will be in Q3 of 2021. More information is available at www.copacontrol.org or by contacting CPLANE.ai.
About CPLANE.ai
CPLANE.ai automates the orchestration of distributed edge computing across a diverse landscape of hardware and software components. CPLANE.ai removes the complexity of provisioning, managing, securing, and evolving distributed systems. CPLANE.ai’s intelligent software platform automates the coordination and configuration of policies and procedures across multiple layers of distributed cloud infrastructure.
by Gary Mintchell | Jun 29, 2021 | Business, News, Organizations
As companies grow, they must seek new markets. Necessity pushes these companies to expand internationally. I was a manager in two companies that were not even large but still needed overseas markets in an attempt to survive.
On the other hand, companies begin in one home country that provides access to many things that helped them start and grow. That country has certain vested interests, too.
One of the issues Trump pressed was the feeling that companies had grown too large and too much was taken overseas. He reflected the feeling of many that the US was weakened by these companies‘ growth and subsequent expansion of manufacturing jobs overseas.
Meanwhile Harry Moser and the Reshoring Initiative has been vocal about some companies’ shortsighted financial calculations moving factories from the US to international locations.
That is some background for this press release. I sympathize with both points of view, and I’m sure the pendulum will swing and things will balance. Unless we witness another huge world war again.
Reshoring has been hot in June. The U.S. Department of Commerce’s Investment Advisory Council (IAC) reported on June 9 its recommendations, including reshoring of semiconductors and pharmaceuticals. The Reshoring Initiative’s Harry Moser teamed up with TEVA’s Terry Creighton, the driving force on the pharma recommendation, and played a leading role in expanding the focus of IAC to include reshoring in addition to foreign direct investment (FDI). At the meeting, Harry advocated for an even greater focus on reshoring and followed up with Under Secretary Farrell, offering the Reshoring Initiative’s help.
On June 8, 2021, the Biden Administration announced its immediate actions based on Executive Order 14017 “America’s Supply Chains.” The actions include major improvements in self-sufficiency in semiconductor chips, pharmaceuticals, rare earth minerals and electric vehicle (EV) batteries. These emergency actions are needed because we have allowed so many supply chain gaps to develop. The Reshoring Initiative recommends also attacking the root cause: U.S. lack of price competitiveness.
Despite the economic slowdown caused by COVID, reshoring numbers were up in 2020. Reshoring and foreign direct investment (FDI) job announcements for 2020 were 160,649, bringing the total jobs announced since 2010 to over 1 million (1,057,054). Additionally, the number of companies reporting new reshoring and FDI set a new record: 1,484 companies. All jobs added are good news, but at this rate, it will take 30 years to reach President Biden’s goal of five million jobs. Actions needed to accelerate the trend are presented in the Report.
Top Takeaways from the 2020 Report
- President Biden is prioritizing reshoring. The gaps in Biden’s plans need to be addressed in order to achieve his goal of returning 5 million more jobs. Details of needed actions are also in our Competitiveness Toolkit.
- In 2020, U.S. reshoring set a record of 109,000 jobs and outpaced FDI for the first time since 2013. COVID/supply chain uncertainty has resulted in companies emphasizing operations in their home countries.
- Recent national initiatives to shorten and close supply chain gaps for essential products aim to make the U.S. less vulnerable. The following industries are most likely to benefit: personal protective equipment (PPE), medical, semiconductor chips and defense. Medical equipment and PPE are the first responders of new reshoring and FDI, with 2020 cases up nearly 2,000% and jobs up 400% from 2019.
- There is continued growth in efforts by Manufacturing Extension Partnerships (MEPs), economic development organizations (EDOs) and states to enable reshoring. The Reshoring Initiative is deeply involved in these efforts with its Import Substitution Program (ISP). As a measure of corporate interest, the demand for this service is more than ten times the rate of 2019.
- We anticipate 2021 reshoring and FDI job announcements to be near 200,000, up by at least 25% from 2020.
See the full report: Reshoring Initiative® 2020 Data Report: COVID Drives Cumulative Jobs Announced Past 1 Million
by Gary Mintchell | Jun 29, 2021 | Automation, Security
Open source is a topic that pops up often these days. I have seen this blog from Google’s open source team about some advances in cybersecurity based upon the recent US Executive Order—something that has spurred many news releases, if not a lot of work.
For you security and open source geeks, check out this Blog post for security.googleblog.com,Thursday, June 24 @ 9 AM ET by Authors: Oliver Chang, Google Open Source Security team and Russ Cox, Go team.
In recent months, Google has launched several efforts to strengthen open-source security on multiple fronts. One important focus is improving how we identify and respond to known security vulnerabilities without doing extensive manual work. It is essential to have a precise common data format to triage and remediate security vulnerabilities, particularly when communicating about risks to affected dependencies—it enables easier automation and empowers consumers of open-source software to know when they are impacted and make security fixes as soon as possible.
We released the Open Source Vulnerabilities (OSV) database in February with the goal of automating and improving vulnerability triage for developers and users of open source software. This initial effort was bootstrapped with a dataset of a few thousand vulnerabilities from the OSS-Fuzz project. Implementing OSV to communicate precise vulnerability data for hundreds of critical open-source projects proved the success and utility of the format, and garnered feedback to help us improve the project; for example, we dropped the Cloud API key requirement, making the database even easier to access by more users. The community response also showed that there was broad interest in extending the effort further.
Today, we’re excited to announce a new milestone in expanding OSV to several key open-source ecosystems: Go, Rust, Python, and DWF. This expansion unites and aggregates four important vulnerability databases, giving software developers a better way to track and remediate the security issues that affect them. Our effort also aligns with the recent US Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity, which emphasized the need to remove barriers to sharing threat information in order to strengthen national infrastructure. This expanded shared vulnerability database marks an important step toward creating a more secure open-source environment for all users.
A simple, unified schema for describing vulnerabilities precisely
As with open source development, vulnerability databases in open source follow a distributed model, with many ecosystems and organizations creating their own database. Since each uses their own format to describe vulnerabilities, a client tracking vulnerabilities across multiple databases must handle each completely separately. Sharing of vulnerabilities between databases is also difficult.
The Google Open Source Security team, Go team, and the broader open-source community have been developing a simple vulnerability interchange schema for describing vulnerabilities that’s designed from the beginning for open-source ecosystems. After starting work on the schema a few months ago, we requested public feedback and received hundreds of comments.
Check out the blog if interested in contributing.
by Gary Mintchell | Jun 28, 2021 | Podcast
Sometimes we clutter our minds with what we think we know and leave no room for learning new things. In the process, we fixate on an idea and miss the simple and most elegant explanation.
I had received a news release from a manufacturing software company so full of jargon that I could barely decipher it. In the midst of the stuff was the claim that there are 40,000 IIoT professionals. Huh? I figured that they renamed engineers and technicians who wire all the field devices into a new profession. Why? Why make things more complicated than they are?
The best bet is to apply Occam’s Razor wherever it fits–the simplest explanation is often the best.
This podcast is sponsored by Inductive Automation. Check out this year’s Ignition Community Conference at https://www.inductiveautomation.com.
by Gary Mintchell | Jun 28, 2021 | News, Organizations
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Artificial Intelligence, which is neither artificial or intelligence, has been around for many years. We knew AI by machine learning (ML) or neural networks. I can remember some classes on those in the early-mid 90s. But AI has become a giant marketing buzz word in the industrial tech market.
I’m not downplaying AI as either the technology or the application. It’s just that so many marketers think of AI as a new and giant advancement instead of a maturing technology that has been, and will continue to have, useful to our applications.
Momentum has grown so much about the use of AI—as in no longer hidden under the covers but right out here in the open—that the A3 association has established a strategy board to guide its efforts in the area. Interesting…
The Association for Advancing Automation (A3) has created a new Artificial Intelligence (AI) Technology Strategy Board of leading AI experts, part of a major initiative to promote education and adoption of the applications of artificial intelligence in automation industries.
This new board places AI leadership at the same level as A3’s existing technology groups: robotics, vision & imaging, and motion control & motors. The AI Technology Strategy Board will be comprised of senior executives from leading AI and technology companies. This is the first time the global trade association has added a technology group to its leadership since adding motion control in 2006. A3 represents 1,100 companies from across the automation industry.
Artificial intelligence is layering atop robotics, vision, motion control, and other automation technologies to create new solutions, great flexibility, and expanding opportunities. Big tech companies—once focused more on phones than factory floors—now view manufacturing, robotics, and industrial automation as key segments of their business.
“Artificial intelligence—in many shapes and forms—will be the stitching that weaves together a new age of industry,” said Jeff Burnstein, president of A3. “As the global trade group of the automation industry, we need to help prepare our members to seize this potential.”
The creation of the technology strategy board is the culmination of a three-year effort to educate and inform automation leaders about the growing importance of artificial intelligence. The board’s chairman is John Lizzi, Executive Leader-Robotics at GE Research, who has chaired and played a leading role in the A3’s AI efforts to date. Companies such as Amazon, GE, Google, Intel, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Siemens and others have helped guide A3’s initiatives. Robert Huschka, A3’s vice president of education strategies, will serve as the association’s liaison to the new board.
Last fall, A3 hosted its first virtual AI conference, the AI & Smart Automation Conference, with more than 1,600 virtual registrants. Last year, A3 released the whitepaper, “Intelligent Automation: 6 AI Applications That Are Changing Industry.” Focused on real-world use cases for AI, the 20-page paper has become the most-read whitepaper in the history of the association. The association’s new website, AUTOMATE.ORG, has devoted an entire section to artificial intelligence. A3 is also set to begin work on new industry-recognized certification programs on AI and autonomous systems.
AI technologies will play a central role at A3’s two major trade shows in 2022, The Automate Show & Conference, June 6-9, in Detroit, Michigan, and The Vision Show, October 11-13, in Boston, Massachusetts.
