by Gary Mintchell | Nov 23, 2018 | Automation, Networking, Standards, Technology
I will only be at SPS for a few hours this year to check in with old friends and see some of the latest automation goodies. But I’m glad to be there at all. Thank you to Siemens who is sponsoring a press tour that includes a couple of days of intense cybersecurity briefings and workshops.
Oh, and a trip to Allianz Stadium to see the technology and a Bayern Munchen football match.
Some early SPS news:
- Avnu Alliance Demonstrates New Conformance Test Reference Tool
- OPC Foundation promises much news plus addition of Rockwell Automation
OPC Foundation
OPC Foundation has sent a couple of emails inviting us to a press briefing at SPS promising much news. I won’t be in Nuremberg on Tuesday, but I’ll catch up with Stefan and Tom for sure on Wednesday.
The mating dance has ended after a few months. Rockwell Automation has rejoined the OPC Foundation and gained a board seat. OPC Foundation has elected Juergen Weinhofer, vice president of common architecture and technology for Rockwell Automation, to its board of directors. Note that Weinhofer is also the Rockwell delegate to the ODVA board.
Weinhofer’s election to the board extends Rockwell Automation’s engagement in the technical work of the OPC Foundation and its technical advisory council.
“OPC UA has become the dominant open protocol for machine-to-software and machine-to-cloud solutions, and it is becoming critical for companies deploying a Connected Enterprise,” Weinhofer said. “I look forward to helping the OPC Foundation become a leader in machine-to-machine applications and helping OPC UA users unlock more value from their production systems.”
This quote is from the OPC news release. We should note that “Connected Enterprise” (capitalized) is the Rockwell Automation theme. I also note while parsing the comment that Rockwell is still firmly fixed in the factory floor area where Weinhofer specifically states “become a leader in machine-to-machine applications.”
“Rockwell Automation is a proven leader in industry standardization and open information technologies,” said Stefan Hoppe, president of the OPC Foundation. “I welcome not just Juergen’s business and political skills on the board but also the increased technical and commercial contribution that the wider Rockwell Automation team will also bring to the foundation.”
Avnu Alliance
Avnu Alliance, an industry consortium enabling open, standards-based deterministic networking, will exhibit at SPS IPC Drives in the University Stuttgart ISW booth. Avnu Alliance, alongside ISW and Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC), will showcase the role of conformance test plans, testbeds and test reference tools in ensuring an interoperable ecosystem of Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) devices.
“We are in cooperation with IIC, IEEE, IEC and others in creating an interoperable ecosystem through a common network foundation that stems from industry open standards and testing,” said Todd Walter, Avnu Alliance Industrial Segment Chair. “The market will continue to require multiple application layer protocols for networked industrial systems. The Avnu Alliance charter is to enable interoperability at the network layer, to ensure ‘One TSN.’ We are the organization focused on providing TSN test plans and reference test architectures to anyone in the industry that wants to test for TSN compatibility.”
As such, Avnu serves to support Fieldbus organizations by providing its TSN conformance tests and procedures to ensure those organizations’ interoperability in the wider Ethernet system.
Leveraging the industry-defined requirements for TSN network interoperability, Avnu ensures there is a universal set of test plans for conformance to guarantee interoperability at the network layer. Avnu has developed a baseline test plan in the industrial market that ensures industrial devices, whether end device, infrastructure component or silicon, conform to the relevant IEEE standards, as well as the industrial automation profile being defined by IEC/IEEE 60802 Joint Project working group.
Starting with Time Synchronization, or 802.1AS as the foundation for all TSN devices, Avnu released the first set of test plans at SPS IPC Drives in 2017. Avnu will soon publish additional conformance test plans for end devices, such as enhancements for scheduled traffic.
At SPS IPC Drives 2018, Avnu Alliance will show a new proof-of-concept (POC) Conformance Test Reference Design that offers a single, streamlined way for vendors to test TSN interoperability. The POC Conformance Test Reference Design is designed to automatically test TSN devices for compliance to 802.1AS. The demonstration features a Linux open-source test tool created by ISW in partnership with Avnu. This tool would also allow other protocol organizations to test application stacks on top of a TSN network in a streamlined way enabling one-stop certification at any test house.
by Gary Mintchell | Sep 27, 2017 | Automation, Standards
This article appeared in TechCrunch. It’s pretty IT oriented, but the thoughts are relevant for the OT world, too.
The author, Ron Miller, reported that Amazon’s AWS move to join an industry standard on a technology known as containers signals the importance of standards.
Get Smart: Standards develop in a number of ways. Not all of them are ISA or ISO or IEC, although these definitely have a place. An industry leader once told me, “Gary, the best industry standards are de facto standards.” These are the ones that build a critical mass among users and developers and that solve real problems.
When AWS today became a full-fledged member of the container standards body, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, it represented a significant milestone. By joining Google, IBM, Microsoft, Red Hat and just about every company that matters in the space, AWS has acknowledged that when it comes to container management, standards matter.
Does this sound familiar to the industrial automation market? AWS has been known to go the proprietary route, after all. When you’re that big and powerful, and control vast swaths of market share as AWS does, you can afford to go your own way from time to time. Containers is an area it hasn’t controlled, though. That belongs to Kubernetes, the open source container management tool originally developed inside Google.
What does it take for standards to win? Once it recognized Google’s dominance in container management, the next logical step was to join the CNCF and adhere to the same container standards the entire industry is using. Sometimes it’s better to switch than fight, and this was clearly one of those times.
The reason for standards. Standards provide a common basis for managing containers. Everyone can build their own tools on top of them. Google already has when it built Kubernetes, Red Hat has OpenShift, Microsoft makes Azure Container Service — and so forth and so on.
As for end users: Companies like standards because they know the technology is going to work a certain way, regardless of who built it. Each vendor provides a similar set of basic services, then differentiates itself based on what it builds on top.
Benefits for all: Technology tends to take off once a standard is agreed upon by the majority of the industry. Look at the World Wide Web. It has taken off because there is a standard way of building web sites. When companies agree to the building blocks, everything else seems to fall into place.
by Gary Mintchell | Aug 22, 2017 | Standards
Standards that enable interoperability drives innovation and industry growth.
For some reason, technology suppliers tend to avoid standards at almost all costs—and the costs can be substantial in terms of losing market share or momentum—in order to build a “complete” solution all their own.
One reason beyond the obvious is that standards creation can be a time-consuming and tedious process.
Where would we be without standardized shipping containers, standardized railway tracks and cars, standardized Ethernet and the ISO stack, and more?
I’ve been working with OPC Foundation and am finishing a white paper about the technology of combining two standards—OPC UA and Time Sensitive Networking. This is going to be huge some day.
I also work with a standards organization known as MIMOSA which has promulgated an information standard for asset lifecycle management.
These are key technologies that can move industry forward
I ran across this article by Ron Miller on TechCrunch about standards in another area—cloud services. This article discusses Amazon Web Services (AWS).
AWS just proved why standards drive technology platforms
Quoting from Miller:
When AWS today became a full-fledged member of the container standards body, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, it represented a significant milestone. By joining Google, IBM, Microsoft, Red Hat and just about every company that matters in the space, AWS has acknowledged that when it comes to container management, standards matter.
AWS has been known to go the proprietary route, after all. When you’re that big and powerful, and control vast swaths of market share as AWS does, you can afford to go your own way from time to time. Containers is an area it hasn’t controlled, though. That belongs to Kubernetes, the open source container management tool originally developed inside Google.
AWS was smart enough to recognize that Kubernetes is becoming an industry standard in itself, and that when it comes to build versus buy versus going open source, AWS wisely recognized that battle has been fought and won.
What we have now is a clearer path to containerization, a technology that is all the rage inside large companies — for many good reasons. They allow you to break down the application into discrete manageable chunks, making updates a heck of a lot easier, and clearly dividing developer tasks and operations tasks in a DevOps model.
Standards provide a common basis for managing containers. Everyone can build their own tools on top of them. Google already has when it built Kubernetes, Red Hat has OpenShift, Microsoft makes Azure Container Service — and so forth and so on.
Companies like standards because they know the technology is going to work a certain way, regardless of who built it. Each vendor provides a similar set of basic services, then differentiates itself based on what it builds on top.
Technology tends to take off once a standard is agreed upon by the majority of the industry. Look at the World Wide Web. It has taken off because there is a standard way of building web sites. When companies agree to the building blocks, everything else seems to fall into place.
A lack of standards has traditionally held back technology. Having common building blocks just make sense. Sometimes a clear market leader doesn’t always agree. Today AWS showed why it matters, even to them.
by Gary Mintchell | May 4, 2017 | Operations Management, Standards
Manufacturing and production information is rapidly moving to the cloud. I wrote yesterday about what all the companies are trying to do to bring information into their ecosystems. Not all the efforts promote interoperability. Dell is open source, coming the closest to the ideal. Microsoft and Siemens are closest for individual companies.
What they are all lacking is bringing in asset lifecycle information.
Enter MIMOSA, developer and proponent of the most complete asset lifecycle information model. CCOM has been publicly proved in the Oil & Gas Pilot Demo Project and in several private company instances.
Another drawback to these systems occurs when a company implements more than one. Let’s suppose that a company installs both SAP and Microsoft. And then maybe GE Predix. How are these proprietary systems all going to get along together?
MIMOSA has a solution—web service Information Service Bus Model the heart of the Open Industrial Interoperability Ecosystem (OIIE). These open standards describe how to tie together all the parts into an interoperable industrial system.
These standards plus current efforts to define Industry Standard Datatsheet Definition and a joint working group to write a companion specification with OPC UA will be discussed at the open meeting.
There will be an MIMOSA meeting on Sept. 28-29. All are invited to attend. BP Helios Center, 201 Helios Way, Houston, Texas 77079
More information coming.
For deeper information on MIMOSA click on the white paper small ad on the right.
by Gary Mintchell | Nov 28, 2016 | Automation, Networking, Technology
FDT IIoT Server
The FDT Group announced a revised mission statement, an IIoT Server, and agreements with other organizations—OPC Foundation, ODVA for CIP, and AutomationML–at its press conference at SPS 2016 in Nuremberg.
This highlights the role of technology organizations in this connected era—they must cooperate and collaborate or die.
“FDT is the open standard for industrial automation integration of networks and devices, harnessing IIoT and Industrie 4.0 for enterprise-wide connectivity” proclaims the organization on its updated Website.
The FDT Group launched FDT/IIoT Server (FITS) for mobility, cloud, and fog enterprise applications. The FITS solution protects industry investments in FDT through advanced business logic, well-defined interfaces and common components, and enables operating system (OS) agnostic implementation of the technology while supporting today’s integrated automation architecture.
The server features robust layered security leveraging vetted industry standards and utilizing encrypted communications with transport layer security (TLS).
FITS also takes advantage of an OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA) annex enabling sensor-to-cloud, enterprise-wide connectivity in industrial control systems used in the process, hybrid and factory automation markets. Together, FDT and OPC UA allow sensor, network and topology information to permeate the enterprise, including mobile devices, distributed control systems (DCSs), programmable logic controllers (PLCs), enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, the cloud, and the IIoT and Industry 4.0.
According to Glenn Schulz, managing director of the FDT Group, the FITS solution represents the key architectural role that FDT plays in an intelligent enterprise. “The FDT Group is working with the various IIoT initiatives around the world to ensure that our new architecture meets their emerging requirements,” Schulz said. “In addition, the FDT platform is being enhanced to include operating system agnostic support for standard browsers, fit-for-purpose apps, and general web services for any potential expansion. These advancements underscore our support for the hundreds of thousands of installed FDT/FRAMES and tens of millions of FDT-enabled products in the global installed base.”
It announced the release of an annex to the FDT standard for the OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA).
The FDT/OPC UA annex is intended for implementation by automation system manufacturers in FDT Frame Applications (FDT/FRAMEs). System suppliers with an FDT/FRAME embedded in their distributed control system (DCS), asset management system, programmable logic controller (PLC) or other system have the ability to include an OPC UA server in an application accessible from any OPC UA client application.
The combined FDT/OPC standards create a single system infrastructure that standardizes the connection of industrial networks, automation systems and devices. This approach enables unification of system engineering, configuration and diagnosis in Industrie 4.0, and supports Industrie 4.0 devices, but is also able to build a bridge to Industrie 3.0 networks and devices.
Also announced was release of an updated annex to the current FDT standard for ODVA’s media-independent Common Industrial Protocol (CIP). Network adaptations of CIP include EtherNet/IP, DeviceNet, CompoNet and ControlNet. The latest version of the CIP annex to the FDT specification enables the use of proven and widely implemented ODVA networks in FDT/FRAME Applications with the latest enhancements.
And a further announcement was integration of the open AutomationML data exchange standard into open, non-proprietary FDT Technology. Together, the two standards will help advance global adoption of Industrie 4.0 solutions.
First developed in 2006, AutomationML is intended to standardize data exchange in the engineering phase of production systems.
