I just saw this opportunity to hear two industry leaders whom I respect very much. You can hear Dave Emerson of Yokogawa and Dennis Brandl of BR&L consulting on this this MESA Webcast that explains how to use two new integration standards to greatly simplify and speed up business-to-production floor integration, and integration among production floor systems. This work was sponsored by the Open O&M Initiative organization, of which MESA is a member. These new standards are being developed by the ISA95 committee.
The first standard is the Information Service Bus Model (ISBM) which defines a standard method for interfacing with different Enterprise Service Buses, such as TIBCO, WebMethods, NetWeaver, and the like in order to send and receive messages between applications. The ISBM reduces the number of interfaces that vendors and end users need to support in their integration projects.
The second standard is the Common Interoperability Registry (CIR) which defines a standard method for reconciling the different names of objects and enumerations between systems. This standard helps solve issues such as multiple names for the same piece of equipment, or different names for the same status and quality values. The CIR provides a standard interface to a common global name space repository, an important but often forgotten part of any integration project.
While you’re at it, consider registering for the MESA 2013 NA Conference held in Greenville, SC on April 22-24. Agenda looks pretty cool.
I have previously written about the Open O&M Initiative: about the debutanizer pilot project at ISA Automation Week and here about interoperability among others.