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 31, 2017 | Standards
Joint working groups to develop companion specifications has been a great method to advance interoperability. Here is an announcement of one where you can still get involved if you have expertise in one or the other. Note: I am chief marketing officer of MIMOSA and I also have done some work with OPC Foundation.
MIMOSA (an operations and maintenance information open system alliance) and the OPC Foundation have announced a joint working group to develop a companion specification for MIMOSA’s CCOM standard and OPC UA.
MIMOSA is a not-for-profit trade association dedicated to developing and encouraging the adoption of open information standards for Operations and Maintenance in manufacturing, fleet, and facility environments. MIMOSA’s open standards enable collaborative asset lifecycle management in both commercial and military applications.
MIMOSA CCOM (Common Collaborative Object Model) serves as an information model for the exchange of asset information. Its core mission is to facilitate standards-based interoperability between systems: providing an XML model to allow systems to electronically exchange data.
OPC Foundation is a not-for-profit association dedicated to providing the interoperability standard for the secure and reliable exchange of data in the industrial automation space and in other industries. The OPC UA (Unified Architecture) is platform independent and ensures the seamless flow of information among devices from multiple vendors.
The OPC UA standard is a series of specifications developed by industry vendors, end-users and software developers. These specifications define the interface between Clients and Servers, as well as Servers and Servers, including secure access to real-time data, monitoring of alarms and events, access to historical data and other applications. The standard includes the ability to securely transport any information model between the systems. It is a key standard for Industry 4.0.
The joint MIMOSA and OPC Foundation CCOM OPC UA Working Group will develop an OPC UA Information Model for CCOM. The information model specified by CCOM will be defined in a UA companion specification using OPC UA constructs for the purpose of exposing CCOM information to OPC UA applications, with an initial focus on existing Use Cases relating to information exchange to and from the control system. This will combine existing strengths of each organization for some near-term wins, where OPC UA is used to bring information from the factory floor and where MIMOSA plays its traditional role in Asset Management.
The working group will deliver the following:
• OPC UA Information Model for CCOM (Standard OPC UA companion specification, Nodeset file and prototype implementation)
• A write up for the OPC Wiki describing the Companion specification
• Trade show demonstration and information material
Anyone who would like to contribute to this industry specification please contact Alan Johnston [email protected].
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 | May 3, 2017 | Automation, Data Management, Networking, Operations Management, Security, Technology
OPC UA was everywhere in the Digital Factory and automation areas of Hannover Fair 2017. Not only was the expanded OPC Foundation stand busy, an “OPC Wall” at the Microsoft stand was constantly packed. Microsoft executives took attendees on a digital path using OPC UA from the factory to the Azure cloud.
Spokespeople pointed out that OPC UA was crucial to a solution that was open, secure, and agnostic. While waiting for the finalization of OPC UA pub/sub (publish / subscribe), they wrote a transport in JSON and AMQP to get there.
The OPC Foundation announced an open-source implementation of the OPC UA technology, available on GitHub to truly enable the OPC community successful adoption of OPC UA across all markets and all platforms.
Microsoft contributed a huge amount of lines of code to this open source effort.
OPC UA is the set of standards for multivendor multiplatform secure reliable interoperability for moving /information from the embedded world to the cloud. The testimonial to the standards is a complete reference implementation that is now been posted as an open-source implementation, replacing the original OPC Foundation .NET deliverables that were developed and maintained for the last 10 years.
The original OPC Foundation .NET OPC UA reference implementation has been available to OPC Foundation members and last year was provided as an open-source implementation on GitHub. This version was targeted and limited to Microsoft Windows only.
The new OPC Foundation reference stack, based on the new .NET Standard Library technology, was developed and optimized by Microsoft to serve as the complete platform-independent infrastructure, from the embedded world to the cloud. This new version is enabled on the following supported platforms: Various Linux distributions, iOS, Android, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 10, Windows Phone, HoloLens and the Azure cloud.
One of the important features of the .Net Standard stack is the expansion of the security features to meet the needs of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) applications, as well as the requirements of “Plattform Industrie 4.0”.
Additional benefits of the OPC UA .Net Standard Stack include:
- The .Net Standard stack is cross platform specifically enabling OPC UA applications.
- The .Net Standard API portability strategy is all about developing once and running everywhere: No need to special-case OS-specific functionality.
- The architecture of the .Net Standard stack focuses on managed code, which translates to rapid application development.
- Microsoft deliberately enabled the creation of NuGet packages, which allows suppliers to quickly integrate OPC UA support into their application with a few simple clicks.
- The .Net Standard stack includes increased security inclusive of support for SHA512.
- The .Net Standard stack enable support for cross-platform UI design tools through Xamarin.
- Microsoft has provided, in conjunction with the OPC Foundation, an extremely rich set of sample applications, inclusive of reference clients, reference servers, an aggregation server, an OPC classic wrapper and a web application to quickly display OPC UA telemetry data sent to the cloud.
- Microsoft has also provided, in conjunction with the OPC Foundation complete samples demonstrating Azure connectivity leveraging the OPC UA publish/subscribe technology (the specification of which is currently being finalized).
Microsoft’s Sam George, Director of Microsoft Azure IoT said “OPC UA has truly established itself as the interoperability standard for Industrial IoT. We are honored to work with the OPC Foundation on the continued evolution of the standard. The response from the Industrial IoT community to our .Net Standard reference stack contribution has been very positive.”
OPC Foundation’s President Thomas J. Burke said, “The Microsoft commitment to open standards, and specifically to the OPC Foundation is absolutely amazing. Microsoft is clearly a pioneer and a leader in developing and bringing to market the best technology that truly enables multivendor information integration and interoperability. It has been a pleasure to work with the Microsoft development team, and how they are enabling so many of the suppliers to have seamless connectivity to the Azure cloud, through their development and commitment providing an open-source implementation of the OPC UA technology”.
Stefan Hoppe, OPC Foundation’s Vice President said, “Microsoft is the strongest open-source contributor to the OPC Foundation’s industrial interoperability standard, OPC UA. Microsoft’s integration of the OPC UA code with Microsoft Azure IoT as well as Windows IoT allows companies to bring millions of devices and apps to the public cloud and manage them with one single application, no matter if the devices run on Windows, Linux, iOS or Android. Using this OPC UA implementation, IT and Manufacturing will merge seamlessly”.
Siemens’ Thomas Hahn said: “As a founding member, Siemens has supported the OPC Foundation for years. For us, open connectivity – from shop floor to the cloud – is a must. We therefore appreciate the availability of OPC UA technology as open source!”
The OPC Foundation will continue to develop, maintain and extend this new .NET technology as the new OPC Foundation endorsed open-source .NET reference implementation. Some of these significant new features to be added include the publish/subscribe extensions as well as support for important IoT protocols like AMQP and MQTT.
by Gary Mintchell | May 2, 2017 | Internet of Things
Internet of Things platforms were all over Hannover Fair last week as I put on more than five miles a day walking checking out as much as I could see.
A few years ago, Industrie 4.0 was unveiled. Last year it was Digitalization. This year Industry 4.o is assumed. Internet of Things is assumed. The race is on for the platform for Internet of Things this year.
One consistent technology, though, that almost all platforms tout–OPC UA. You saw that logo everywhere. [Note: OPC Foundation paid most of my expenses to attend.]
What do I mean by platform? It is the central technology by which everything connects. Most of the time it is what we call proprietary, that is, controlled by one company. It builds a database with connectors to the world. All protocols (they encourage everyone to participate in their own system) bring in data. Sometimes the provider does all the analysis and provides all the applications. Sometimes the provider allows connection to other apps, as well.
I’ve written about the Dell / Linux Foundation effort–after I got through the hype and found the meat. This effort is all open source allowing tie ins with individual company applications.
Microsoft also has an ecosystem or platform that is open with some open source. It relies heavily on OPC UA for data input. Microsoft has its Internet of Things applications but can allow connection to others.
Siemens has its platform called Mindsphere. Siemens is a major proponent of OPC UA.
GE Digital has Predix. It likes OPC UA, too.
SAP is building a platform entirely within its umbrella but encouraging other companies to join it and allows the other apps to run. It also employs OPC UA.
A company I just got a deep dive with for the first time is Exosite. It is a database/analytics developer. At present it is not as broad as the others, but it has the desire to grow to that status.
And then there is Cisco. Yes, the company that builds the network components and OS that control the flow of all your data. Since they know where your data is, it can tap into it and it also has an IoT platform, database, and analytics engine.
By comparison, Rockwell Automation’s Connected Enterprise is totally inbred to Rockwell. I’m sure that in places such as North America where it has huge market share the connectivity works well. It will use some OPC UA next year, so a spokesman told me.
If this is any indication, the Internet of Things has become a “real” thing. Many of these platforms more or less existed before. But Internet of Things adoption obviously is attracting such good things as competition and innovation.
More from Hannover the rest of the week. I’m still compiling notes.
