by Gary Mintchell | Aug 29, 2017 | Automation, News, Organizations
Interoperability spurs innovation. After years of technological consolidation in the process automation industry with “distributed control systems” becoming ever more centralized, we are witnessing a resurgence of distributed, along with open and interoperable.
Open Process Automation Forum
Yesterday I discussed Foxboro promoting the Open Process Automation Forum. Today, I can report that the OPC Foundation has also formally joined the forum. It fits given that OPC UA is one of the key standards that the OPAF will need for its interoperable system to work.
The OPC Foundation has developed a whitepaper, an introspective on process automation, elaborating on the vision of OPC UA and why the OPC Foundation is engaging in The Open Process Automation Forum.
The OPC Foundation vision includes the key element of information modeling, providing a foundation for other standards organizations to directly plug-in their data/information models into OPC UA.
OPC UA Seminar Tour
Here is a free opportunity to learn about open standards, OPC UA, a chance to meet with leaders in the interoperability field – in one day, in one place. Oh, and at two of those sessions (Milwaukee and Cleveland) one of those leaders will be me!
The seminar is designed for corporate leaders, IT professionals, students and all interested in IT to learn more about open standards, their place in this constantly changing arena of IIot, Industre 4.0, the Cloud and beyond and how this knowledge will benefit their life, their career and their company.
This seminar tour will focus on the rich feature set of OPC UA and the unique ways these features are put to use in real applications. By attending these conferences you will:
- Learn how OPC UA provides Industrial Interoperability for the Internet of Things and Industry 4.0
- Learn about OPC UA in the world of the IIC, China 2025, Korea Manufacturing Innovation 3.0
- Hear why end-users are requiring vendors to build OPC UA into their products
- Get latest update on OPC-UA technology and further roadmap enhancements
- Learn how active collaborations with other industry organizations are working to revolutionize the transformation of data, providing an infrastructure for the modeling of information
- Network with industry experts and peers
- Hear how Microsoft is positioning Azure with OPC UA extensions
- How to connect your machine to SAP easily and standardized
- Learn why OPC UA is the one and only recommendation for communication channel for RAMI4.0 – the Reference Architecture Model Industrie 4.0
Here are the event details:
September 26 – San Diego
September 27 – Santa Clara
September 28 – Seattle
September 29 – Vancouver
October 3 – Minneapolis
October 5 – Toronto
October 9 – Milwaukee
October 11 – Cleveland
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 | Mar 15, 2017 | Automation, Process Control, Standards
The latest attempt at building an open control platform is driven by ExxonMobil and given some support by the ARC Advisory Group by offering a venue for meetings. I wrote about the meeting during the ARC Forum in Orlando. What I find most interesting is linking this to the Internet of Things.
It will be interesting to see where this leads. I’ve seen attempts in the past to try to get suppliers to ditch their computing or control platforms to go with a generic open system where end users could drive pricing down to commodity levels. Of course, such a system would require lots of engineering—a boon to systems integrators.
Although the dream of complete plug-and-play requiring no integration is a problem waiting a solution. We’ve seen this scenario play out in the computer business. The result was locked down hardware with a measure of interoperability of systems. I think that this is where standards are most valuable.
WindRiver has cast its lot with the ExxonMobil-led Open Process Control initiative and has announced a product in support of the effort. It has announced availability of a software virtualization platform enabling critical infrastructure companies to cost-effectively evolve aging legacy control systems not previously designed to support the connected nature of IoT. Wind River Titanium Control empowers the next generation of on-premise analytics to optimize industrial processes.
“ARC believes the influx of new IIoT technologies now entering the automation market has the potential to be a major disruption to existing business models that have been relatively stable for decades,” said Harry Forbes, research director at ARC Advisory Group, a leading technology research firm for industry and infrastructure. “An excellent example is Titanium Control, which combines Wind River’s long experience in real-time operating systems with on-premise cloud computing technology. This combination enables the virtualization of real-time automation applications that until recently could only be implemented in embedded systems hardware. The implications of this capability for the manufacturing automation market are very far-reaching, and automation suppliers are noticing.”
Because traditional industrial control systems were not designed to support IoT, most are rigid, single purpose, and have a high cost to deploy, integrate, and maintain. Additionally, the obsolescence cycle is driving system updates that require new systems to keep pace with innovation while maintaining or lowering capital costs.
Titanium Control is a commercially deployable on-premise cloud infrastructure that virtualizes traditional physical subsystems using a platform based on open standards. It delivers the high performance, high availability, flexibility, and low latency needed to reduce capital and operating expenses, as well as minimize unscheduled downtime for industrial applications and control services at any scale. Unlike enterprise IT virtualization platforms, it provides high reliability for applications and services deployed at the network edge, for example in fog deployments.
Key features of Titanium Control include:
- De facto standard open source software for on-premise cloud and virtualization, including Linux, real-time Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) and OpenStack
- High performance and high availability with accelerated vSwitch and inter-VM communication, plus virtual infrastructure management
- Security features including isolation, secure boot and Trusted Platform Module enabled through Enhanced Platform Awareness
- Scalability from two to over 100 compute nodes
- Hitless software updates and patching with no interruption to services or applications
“With the emergence of Industrial IoT, companies are looking to deploy next-generation open and secure control systems; Titanium Control addresses this need, and is in active trials with customers in industries ranging from manufacturing to energy to healthcare,” said Jim Douglas, president of Wind River. “Our software has been providing these companies with powerful ways to increase efficiency and bolster safety, security, and reliability for the last 35 years. With the addition of Titanium Control to our product portfolio, Wind River is driving a new industrial era through virtualization, real-time performance and edge-to-cloud connectivity.”
Titanium Control is part of the Wind River Titanium Cloud portfolio of virtualization products for the deployment of critical services from operations to data center environments that require real-time performance and continuous service availability. It is optimized for Intel Xeon processors, and is pre-validated on hardware from the leading providers of Intel-based servers.
by Gary Mintchell | Mar 8, 2017 | Automation, Internet of Things, Manufacturing IT, Operations Management, Technology
You’re a technology provider and wish to expand your presence in the Internet of Things (IoT) space? Build partnerships. I’ve written about several over the past year. There will be more. This is the age of partnership. Right now companies have figured out that they cannot be all things to all people.
Here is an interesting one. Opto 22 is not a large company, but because of that it is always pushing the envelope of OT and IT applications. On the other hand, we have IBM, a huge company, and its vaunted Watson super computer technology. A little like peanut butter and chocolate, looks like a winning combination.
Industrial automation manufacturer and Internet of Things application toolset provider Opto 22 announced it has been accepted into the IBM® Watson IoT™ Partner Ecosystem. This partnership provides developers with a full stack toolset for building applications that connect real-world signals and data from industrial “things” to the digital world of information technology, mobile, and cloud computing.
Tapping A $6 Trillion Opportunity
A Business Insider report forecasts there will be $4.8 trillion in aggregate IoT investment between 2016 and 2021. Billions of sensors, machines, and devices already exist in industrial infrastructure but are currently unable to connect to the Internet of things and cloud-based applications, like the IBM Watson IoT Platform.
This legacy equipment holds valuable untapped data that is needed to improve business processes and decisions in almost every enterprise and every industry. The partnership between IBM and Opto 22 enables developers to rapidly design, prototype, and deploy applications to connect existing industrial assets to the IBM Watson IoT platform and share their data, capabilities, and resources with other connected systems and assets, to build the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT).
Building IIoT applications has historically been complex, requiring multiple layers of expensive middleware and significant developer manpower. IIoT applications built from the ground up can take months or even years, and require expertise in both the operations technology (OT) domain, where industrial assets live, and the information technology (IT) domain, where digital and cloud computing assets exist. These long development cycles increase cost, slow time to market, and increase risk of IIoT project failure for customers. Together these problems delay and reduce the return on investment for implementing IIoT applications.
Streamlining and Simplifying IIoT Application Development
Through this partnership, developers and systems integrators have a concise toolset for connecting the OT and IT domains. Combining open technologies like RESTful APIs and Node-RED with powerful and proven computing platforms like the IBM Watson IoT platform decreases development time, eliminates the need for expensive middleware, reduces risk for customers, and gets solutions to market faster.
According to Evans Data Corporation, 79% of Internet of Things app developers spend at least 25% of their time on developing analytics tools. The Watson IoT Platform reduces the need to focus on developing analytics systems and provides everything needed to harness the full potential of the Internet of Things. Rather than reinventing the wheel, developers can tap into the already built toolset provided by the IBM Watson IoT Platform.
Developers can connect, set up, and manage edge processing devices like programmable automation controllers from Opto 22 and apply real-time analytics, cognitive services, and blockchain technology to the data generated by these devices. Cognitive APIs deliver natural-language processing, machine-learning capabilities, text analytics, and image analytics to help developers realize the potential of the cognitive era with the IBM Watson IoT Platform.
“The industrial automation and control industry is in transition right now,” says Benson Hougland, Vice President of Marketing and Product Strategy. “A product development strategy based on proprietary and closed technologies is outdated. The future of industrial automation and process control lies in the rising API and data economies made possible through open standards-based technologies. Our objective in partnering with IBM is to enable IIoT developers to build their applications faster using well-known and proven Internet tools and technology like Node-RED, RESTful APIs, and the IBM Watson IoT Platform.”
Getting Started With Opto 22 and IBM Watson IoT
Opto 22 has provided a recipe for developers to get started in connecting industrial systems to the Watson IoT Platform, as well as a video walking developers through the steps. Developers can access a trial version of the Watson IoT Platform on the IBM website.
