I quit my full-time job to become an independent blogger in 2013. One of the best decisions I ever made. It didn’t cost me much income those first years, and it saved me much grief over the ensuing time.
The blog’s name changed to The Manufacturing Connection. I thought at the time technology advances and applications would be all about connection/connectivity. That’s still true.
This news from Yokogawa emphasizes advances toward the nirvana of bringing information technology and operations technology into closer relationship. The problem solved by this is, of course, data. Data makes the enterprise go round.
Yokogawa states this new release of OpreX Collaborative Information Server (CI Server) strengthens connectivity with a range of devices and applications to “support digital transformation.”
OpreX Collaborative Information Server brings together large volumes of data from various plant equipment and systems to enable the optimized management of production activities across an entire enterprise, and provide the environment needed to remotely monitor and manage operations from any location and make swift decisions.
Here is what’s new
1. Addition of CI Gateway component—At renewable energy facilities and the like, gateways are deployed at various locations for the collection of data required for integrated monitoring and operations. And in all kinds of industries, the use of gateways for the relay of plant data to assemble higher-level applications is a common practice. In this release, a new component, CI Gateway, has been added. Compared to the previous version, this allows for simpler and more flexible implementation, making it easier to deploy OpreX Collaborative Information Server as a dedicated gateway.
I don’t know how many organizations I’ve been involved with where I’ve advocated RESTful APIs. This from Yokogawa.
2. Support of RESTful API—The RESTful API is a standard web application interface that is widely used in IT applications. With this release, it is now possible to access OpreX Collaborative Information Server data via the RESTful API. This facilitates access to operational technology (OT) data and leads to closer convergence between IT and OT systems, thereby realizing seamless integration and the efficient use of data. For example, it is now possible to construct a general-purpose web browser-based KPI dashboard that aggregates and displays data from various systems.
And finally:
3. Enhanced IEC 61850 communication driver—IEC61850 is an international protocol for communication networks/systems that is essential in the renewable energy industry. The enhanced support for this standard enables users to select safer interactive operations in place of certain operations that previously were executed automatically. For greater flexibility in operations, it is also now possible to utilize device report data as OpreX Collaborative Information Server data.
