The Open Applications Group Inc. (OAGi) and the ISA-SP95 working group, standards organizations that focus on the discrete and process sectors respectively, are cooperating to rationalize the multiplicity of standards that vendors and manufacturers must support to enable enterprise and plant-floor application integration.
OAGi, an 11-year-old, not-for-profit independent standards group, has promulgated a standard called OAGIS that uses XML and Web services to enable business applications to interoperate with manufacturing processes in discrete verticals such as aerospace and automotive. ISA-95, another non-profit, has put forth a multi-part standard that defines the fundamental elements of a production process, including people, equipment, and materials -- a standard that has been heavily adopted by process manufacturers.
Under Part 5 of ISA-95, currently in draft form, the ISA-SP95 working group will incorporate a subset of the language used in OAGIS to fill out what it calls the Business to Manufacturing Transactions Standard.
Part 5 is "taking that [ISA-95] model and saying, 'How would you use OAGIS to transact messages around the [production] schedule and so forth?'" said Keith Unger, chairman of ISA-SP95 and principal manufacturing information technology consultant at Stone Technologies, a systems integrator in St. Louis, MO.
This harmonization is not likely to result in a new unified standard, Unger said in an interview with Managing Automation. That's because there are unique aspects of both approaches upon which manufacturers in different verticals rely. But the standards will become more compatible, coalescing under the umbrella group of OpenO&M (Open standards for Operations and Maintenance), an organization in which the ISA (Instrumentation and Systems Automation Society), OPC Foundation, World Batch Forum (WBF), and founding member MIMOSA (Machinery Information Management Open Systems Alliance) already participate. OAGi recently became a member.
"The core capabilities are substantial, but none of us are trying to do everything on our own," said Alan T. Johnston, MIMOSA's president and CEO. For example, OAGIS does not get into granular definitions of the underlying physical assets -- which the group needs as manufacturers demand tighter interoperability between MES and enterprise applications.
"If you logically break it down you have enterprise systems up top, physical assets at the bottom, and horizontal as well as vertical process layers of operation and maintenance. But in the middle there's a big open [space]," Johnston said in an interview. "Historically, processes have not integrated with each other because systems were not integrated. That's what we are trying to facilitate -- the integration of operations and maintenance up through the enterprise based on the utilization of the appropriate interoperability standards. Under the OpenO&M umbrella we realize there's not one single standard that does everything."
The OAGi and ISA-SP95 convergence initiative is a first step in the harmonization effort. The goal: to reduce the choices that MES and ERP vendors, as well as their customers, must make.
When Part 5 is ready as an official ANSI standard -- which will likely be sometime next year -- software vendors and manufacturers across various industry segments will reap quick rewards. "It will take awhile to sort through, but it should be one to two years -- not decades," Unger said.