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 31, 2017 | Interoperability, News, Operations Management, Standards
Looks like standards and interoperability week at The Manufacturing Connection. I once was pretty active with MESA and lately I’ve gotten to know the IIC. Both good organizations promoting best practices in industry. MESA is not a standards organization, though, but one that promotes Level 3 (MES/MOM) software applications. IIC has taken a leadership roll bringing Internet of Things people and companies together.
The Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) and the Manufacturing Enterprise Solutions Association (MESA) International announced they have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to work together to advance their shared interests. Under the agreement, the IIC and MESA will work together to align efforts to maximize interoperability, portability, security and privacy for the industrial Internet. That all sounds pretty vague and something like motherhood, but I applaud all steps toward collaboration.
Joint activities between the IIC and the MESA will include:
- Identifying and sharing IIoT best practices
- Realizing interoperability by harmonizing architecture and other elements
- Collaborating on standardization
- Collaboration in the areas of industrial analytics and asset performance management (APM)
MESA’s President, Mike Yost, said, “This partnership makes good business sense, with the Industrial Internet Consortium advocating for the broad adoption of industrial Internet technologies and with MESA educating manufacturers and solution providers of all sizes on both how and why to adopt them. Collaborating with the IIC also helps ensure MESA members and IIC members have a common vocabulary and a common understanding of business value.”
“We look forward to working with the Manufacturing Enterprise Solutions Enterprise Association,” said Wael William Diab, IIC Chair of the Liaison Working Group. “Within the manufacturing vertical, industrial analytics and asset intelligence systems enable manufacturers to realize the value of their industrial IoT systems by analyzing and acting on data to increase asset reliability and availability and reduce maintenance. Collaborating on industrial analytics and asset performance management will help to further advance industrial IoT in manufacturing environments.”
MESA and the IIC have agreed to meet regularly to exchange information and have targeted a joint workshop on industrial analytics and asset performance management for Q4. The IIC Liaison Working Group is the gateway for formal relationships with standards and open-source organizations, consortia, alliances, certification and testing bodies and government entities/agencies.
The agreement with the MESA is one of a number of agreements made by the IIC’s Liaison Working Group.
Here is a little more information about the IIC.
The Industrial Internet Consortium maintains active relationships with standards development organizations, open-source organizations, other consortia and alliances, certification and testing bodies and government entities or agencies involved in the Industrial Internet.
The purpose of these relationships is to generate requirements for new standards from every part of the activities taking place within the Industrial Internet Consortium.
These relationships help eliminate duplication of effort and ensure that new standards and technologies necessary to build and enable the Industrial Internet are brought to market more rapidly.
By establishing a formal liaison with the Industrial Internet Consortium, organizations can engage directly with our Working Groups and gain faster access to developing requirements for standards and technologies required for the Industrial Internet across a spectrum of industries and applications.
The Industrial Internet Consortium itself is not a standards organization; however, it strongly advocates for open standard technologies in order to ease the deployment of connected technologies. Our Liaison Working Group is the gateway for the liaison relationships listed below and new ones forming now.
by Gary Mintchell | Aug 28, 2017 | Automation, Organizations, Process Control, Standards
The future of process automation was front and center of discussions last week at the Foxboro User Group—The Foxboro Company being the process automation arm of Schneider Electric.
During the week I was involved in quite animated discussions with SVP Chris Lyden and VP Peter Martin regarding the future of process automation. These executives are convinced that there is an inflexion point we are reaching where we are returning to the open architecture we started with years ago. The pendulum swung toward centralized, integrated systems. Technology has progressed to a point of realizing the old dream of distributed control, interoperable systems, systems of systems, and open systems based on standards.
Martin used his closing remarks to the group to talk about the Open Process Automation Forum, which is organized under The Open Group. You may recall I’ve written about this group following each of the last two ARC Industry Forums in Orlando.
The spark was provided by a group from ExxonMobil who saw a dire need to upgrade its systems. Leaders looked at the huge upfront cost of the control upgrade plus the likelihood of being locked into a single supplier and then facing huge lifecycle costs during the life of the equipment.
“When we released our first DCS 30 years ago, we tried to make it as open as possible,” said Martin. “We felt for future innovation, the system needed to be as open as possible. But the level of standards necessary just didn’t exist.”
When ExxonMobil said they wanted to build an open platform, “we jumped in” added Martin.
Foxboro’s Trevor Cusworth is co-chair of the OPAF. He asked attendees to consider the benefits of joining in the effort. “We need more end users,” he said, “since we have only about 11 right now.”
The key benefit noted was reducing lifecycle costs, while the key technology is a new type of I/O.
From the OPAF brochure:
Not only can you contribute to the creation and development of a new process automation system, you can also:
- Ensure your experience and requirements are included
- Advocate that your industry sector is represented
- Validate that existing standards important to you are used
- Sustain the benefits of the standard and subsequent certification programs
Takeaways: This is an ambitious undertaking. The last one of these I saw eventually fell apart due to a “vicious circle”—suppliers got into the discussion hoping for new sales or the ability to knock off the incumbent; end users failed to not only write the system into their specs even if they did they weren’t enforced; suppliers lost interest due to no sales.
One important thing: If this catches on, it will greatly shake up the process automation supplier market.
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 | Jun 7, 2017 | Asset Performance Management, Operations Management, Process Control, Software, Technology
It is time to think beyond the unit process to asset optimization. Two press releases have come my way in the past couple of weeks from companies who are seeking to expand their product portfolios into ever broadening circles with the theme being adding emphasis on asset optimization.
This release is from Aspen Technology announcing general availability of aspenONE Version 10 software. “The latest Asset Performance Management, Engineering and Manufacturing & Supply Chain software release supports the company’s evolution from process optimization to asset optimization, the next frontier of optimization that makes the best companies even better by driving increased financial return over the entire asset lifecycle.”
If this sounds familiar, Schneider Electric’s Peter Martin has been writing and speaking on this for years. He’s an acknowledged industry visionary. I’ve worked with an industry organization MIMOSA also interested in organizing standards around asset lifecycle. Maybe we’ll begin getting a critical mass around the subject.
Where AspenTech tries to go beyond is to link in design with process and equipment. [Click on the “ad” in the right column of this Website for a white paper describing doing this with standards. We are getting there as an industry.] The aspenONE Version 10 software release includes aspenONE Asset Performance Management (APM).
The integrated suite of APM analytics provides prescriptive guidance to address multiple levels of asset performance:
- Site-Wide Risk Analysis with Aspen Fidelis Reliability software helps identify asset availability and utilization risks through reliability modeling and simulation.
- Process Analytics include Aspen Asset Analytics software to assess the root causes of process disruptions, predict future occurrences and prescribe actions to avoid them. Rapidly configured and deployed, prepackaged analytics for column troubleshooting use ensemble modeling to provide operational guidance. Included as well, Aspen ProMV software improves process reliability and asset uptime using advanced multivariate process analytics for continuous and batch monitoring.
- Equipment Performance Analytics with Aspen Mtell software provides machine-learning analytics that predict when failures will occur, understand why they will occur and prescribe what to do to avoid the failure. aspenONE Engineering Suite Highlights The latest version of aspenONE Engineering software enables asset design optimization across capital, energy, controllability, environmental impact, safety and yield, empowering collaborative workflows that drive sustained profitability.
- Specialty chemicals and pharmaceuticals companies are making significant investments to rapidly develop and deliver new products to market. Aspen Plus software in aspenONE Version 10 extends modeling from continuous to batch and semi-batch processes to help companies accelerate new product development and optimize production to compete more effectively.
- Engineering, Procurement & Construction (EPC) companies need to accelerate projects and reduce risk to compete effectively. The new web-based Aspen Basic Engineering streamlines data integration in FEED preparation and improves collaboration across globally distributed teams.
- Process plants are faced with frequent operational changes and risks to asset utilization. Faster calibration of model to plant data in Aspen Plus and Aspen HYSYS software for operations support reduces operating costs and increase yields.
aspenONE Manufacturing & Supply Chain Suite Highlights Building on the PIMS-AO engine, the new Aspen Unified PIMS features a modern web-based architecture with scalable high performance computing that enables better collaboration and improved insights into model performance.
The first of a family of Unified products envisioned to unify the production workflow from planning to scheduling and performance monitoring, Aspen Unified PIMS will initially be targeted at a specific set of customers identified by the company for the aspenONE Version 10 software release.
