Former Emerson Process Leader Publishes Book

John Berra, former chairman of Emerson Process and the leader who assembled that group, once told me in an interview that he wished someone would write a book about the early days and development of automated process control. If he wad hinting for me, I was the wrong person. More likely it would have been my colleague Walt Boyes. But instead, John has written a book that will be out March 5—Turning the Giant: Disrupting Your Business with Persistent Innovation. I’m glad he did.

I’ve not read the book, yet, but I have it on order. I enjoyed all my interviews with Berra over the years. He was always cerebral, knowledgeable, and visionary. And I discovered at one of my last Emerson events with him that he also played Bellomy (the father of the girl) in community theater production of The Fantasticks. I played that role in the early 70s in Sidney, Ohio. He also wrote a column for me when I was at Automation World after he retired.

My old friend Jim Cahill wrote about the book on his Emerson Process Experts blog—worth a read.

I was fortunate to get an advanced look at John Berra’s new book Turning the Giant: Disrupting Your Business with Persistent Innovation (slated for release on March 5, 2024). John is the Past Chairman of Emerson’s automation business and was President of the Systems business during the development of the DeltaV control system. I read it this past weekend and really enjoyed it because I got to live through many of the stories he shares throughout the book and better see the events from his perspective.

Open Technologies Part Two from ARC Forum with Schneider Electric

I am not attending the annual ARC Forum this year due to some travel conflicts. News does travel, though.

The first Forum I attended way back in 1998 contained a strong presence of open automation from a group called OMAC (Open Modular Architecture Controller). This movement achieved a standardized HMI, especially for packaging machines and now resides within PMMI.

For the past several years the open initiative has been led by a forum within The Open Group called the Open Process Automation Forum (OPAF). Schneider Electric has held a strong presence there along with ABB and Yokogawa. It has really been an industry-led initiative begun by leaders from ExxonMobil. Here is the open technology news from Schneider Electric this year.

In brief:

  • Schneider Electric delivers next-generation, open automation infrastructure in collaboration with Intel and Red Hat 
  • New Distributed Control Node (DCN) software framework to help drive open automation 
  • Solution helps replace vendor-specific hardware with plug-and-produce offer 
  • Interoperability and portability support industrial innovation, reduce obsolescence 

An extension of Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure Automation Expert, this new framework enables industrial companies to move to a software-defined, plug-and-produce solution, allowing them to enhance their operations, ensure quality, reduce complexity, and optimize costs. 

“This project is the culmination of two years of co-innovation to create efficient, future-proof distributed control systems,” said Nathalie Marcotte, Senior Vice President of Process Automation at Schneider Electric. “The DCN framework is key to fostering an open automation approach, enabling industrial businesses to grow and innovate for the future. Its interoperability and portability help our customers enjoy the freedom of shaping technology around their business needs – and not the other way around.” 

Red Hat, in collaboration with Intel, recently announced the creation of a new industrial edge platform that helps provide a modern approach to building and operating industrial controls. Since implementing this platform, Schneider Electric has now deployed Red Hat Device Edge in the new DCN software, in addition to Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and Red Hat OpenShift at the compute layer for DCN deployments, combined with a control infrastructure from Schneider Electric and reference architecture from Intel. 

The framework consists of two main components: an advanced computer platform (ACP), which supervises the control workload by providing the content control and automation capabilities needed to deploy workloads securely and programmatically, along with virtualization and monitoring functionalities; and the DCN, which are low-power, industrial systems using Intel Atom x6400E series processors, dedicated to running controls and designed for workloads f mixed-criticality.

Rockwell Automation Touts Open Technologies at ARC Forum

I am not attending the annual ARC Forum this year due to some travel conflicts. News does travel, though.

The first Forum I attended way back in 1998 contained a strong presence of open automation from a group called OMAC (Open Modular Architecture Controller). This movement achieved a standardized HMI, especially for packaging machines and now resides within PMMI.

For the past several years the open initiative has been led by a forum within The Open Group called the Open Process Automation Forum (OPAF). Schneider Electric has held a strong presence there along with ABB and Yokogawa. It has really been an industry-led initiative begun by leaders from ExxonMobil. More on Schneider Electric in my next post. One of two ‘Open’ press releases from this year’s Forum.

This news is from Rockwell Automation. It evidently has decided to get involved with OPAF this year. You may wonder why. This statement from SVP software and control Brian Shepherd provides a clue. “We appreciate and understand our users need for products and systems that integrate well together and allow for collaboration of edge and cloud data sources. Through working with organizations like OPAF and OPC, we will continue to invest in our systems, products and services for market-leading interoperability, longevity and performance.” 

I imagine at some point we may see an open edge device or even controller from Rockwell Automation. For now, the company touts OPC-UA integration into some products along with supporting MQTT and REST. This is a good start.

Here are four examples Rockwell provided of its new emphasis on openness:

  • PlantPAx’s control platform, based on the company’s Logix Controllers, now natively supports OPC-UA, facilitating direct data sharing with edge and cloud applications. Additional connectivity options are available with MQTT and REST.
  • Embedded Edge Compute Module, which provides a compute surface within the Logix environment, enhances plant-wide connectivity through OPC-UA, MQTT, and REST API communication.
  • FactoryTalk Optix, a scalable platform that can be used in PlantPAx to provide native support for OPC-UA to allow operations, maintenance, and plant personnel to visualize various information originating across the enterprise.
  • The combination of PlantPAx and FactoryTalk DataMosaix provides a leading industrial Data Ops platform that supports OPC-UA, provides contextualization of data from multiple sources. The data models can be used to support pre-built Energy, Batch and Asset optimization solutions from Rockwell Automation or to accelerate development of custom solutions.

Digital Twin and Simulation Technology Power Business and Decision Strategies

I had to wade through a lot of marketing to get to the core of this news from a company that I don’t know. The company is FICO (Fair Isaac Corporation). Founded in 1956 (almost as old as me), it’s a business analytics, data science, predictive analytics company. Of interest to us is work in supply chain resiliency.

The company announced more than 20 enhancements to its Platform

The updates include robust innovations in digital simulations. One of the most significant updates is within the Digital Twin and Simulation capability, which enables users of FICO Platform to create an enterprise digital twin of their organization and unlock the power of business simulations. This allows businesses to experiment across many dimensions, not previously possible, to find optimal business outcomes. Updates include faster deployment for increased efficiency, thorough validation of changes to decision strategies, and better understanding of the impact on business KPIs such as profitability metrics.

Among the 20+ enhancements, key improvements to FICO Platform include:

  • Data Connection and Ingestion – Our latest data-focused enhancements aim to break down organizational siloes and put data into motion with improved data pipelines, a high-performance hotlist service, enriched data feature libraries, and an easy-to-use database service.
  • Applied Analytics & ML and Enterprise Optimization – These updates are focused on enhancing clients’ ability to build world-class predictive credit analytics and ML models, pull in third party models, and apply mathematical optimization to new domains. This release includes improvements to our proprietary segmented scorecards, multi-target scorecards, reject inference, Python APIs, ML execution and optimization solver performance enhancements, and the launch of a new global optimization solver.
  • Intelligent Decisions and Business Composability – This release supports lifecycle management for fine-grained control to easily manage and promote projects from design, staging, and production for even the most complex enterprise environments with better isolation to compress and safely scale change cycles. Additional enhancements provide deeper native integration with other FICO capabilities for applied analytics & ML and simulation so teams can work efficiently across the entire decision intelligence value chain.
  • Digital Twins and Simulation – In this space we dive deeper into the development of a digital twin for businesses to enable experimentation within our Simulation Capability. Our latest release makes it easy for business staff to rapidly construct new business scenarios, pressure test possible changes, validate strategies, and simulate the effects on business KPIs to easily measure operational impact and move fast with confidence.

ABB Acquires Sevensense AI-enabled Mobile Robotics

• Swiss start-up Sevensense, a leader in AI-based navigation, enables the highest levels of speed, accuracy and autonomy of mobile robots, one of the fastest growing robotics markets

• Acquisition underlines ABB’s strategic investment focus on innovative AI solutions transforming industries, such as logistics and manufacturing

• ABB becomes leader in next-generation AMRs, integrating Visual SLAM technology with leading hardware and software portfolio

This is the significant trend of 2024 for major automation companies—acquisitions for innovation and market expansion. ABB already has a strong robotic presence. This should be good for them. Expanding the idea of automation assisting humans, here is a statement from the ABB Robotics President.

“This marks a significant step towards our vision of a workplace where AI-enabled robots assist people, addressing our customers’ needs for greater flexibility and intelligence amidst critical skilled labor shortages,” said Sami Atiya, President of ABB Robotics and Discrete Automation. “Each mobile robot, equipped with vision and AI, scans a unique part of the building; collectively these robots complement each other’s view to form a complete map, enabling them to work autonomously in a rapidly changing environment.”

Sevensense’s pioneering navigation technology combines AI and 3D vision, enabling AMRs to make intelligent decisions, differentiating between fixed and mobile objects in dynamic environments. Once manually guided, mobile robots with Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (Visual SLAM) technology create a map that is used to operate independently, reducing commissioning time from weeks to days and enabling the AMRs to navigate in highly complex, dynamic environments alongside people. Maps are constantly updated and shared across the fleet, offering instant scalability without interrupting operations and greater flexibility compared to other navigation technologies. 

Mitsubishi Corporation Invests in ThinkIQ to Drive Digital Transformation

I have been wondering where ThinkIQ is going to wind up. It’s a pretty cool startup in the smart manufacturing software space (aka, MES). The company has taken an investment by Mitsubishi Corporation and a collaboration agreement to jointly accelerate the growth of ThinkIQ’s digital manufacturing platform in Japan. Terms of the investment were not disclosed.

ThinkIQ has built its open platform working closely with U.S. and European government smart manufacturing and Industry 4.0 initiatives and global standards bodies.  The investment is further testament to ThinkIQ’s technology and will drive expansion leveraging Mitsubishi’s global presence.

ThinkIQ provides visibility to the manufacturing shop floor across each tier of complex supply chains. The SaaS platform securely connects to the physical world of legacy and smart equipment, IoT sensors, OT and IT systems to bring all relevant data into a single analytics platform that brings context, meaning and discoverability for all participants in supply chain and manufacturing operations. ThinkIQ Vision brings vision-processing software combined with powerful pre-packaged Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence capabilities to turn standard cameras on the shop floor into sensors that eliminate blind spots across equipment, materials, and people to greatly enhance the available data for Continuous Intelligence.

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