A long awaited and welcome announcement from ISA:
Manufacturing Interoperability Guideline Working Group – A Collaborative
Venture of ISA, MIMOSA, OAGi, OPC, and WBF
Research Triangle Park, NC (23 March 2006) – The creation of the
Manufacturing Interoperability Guideline Working Group, a collaborative
venture of ISA, MIMOSA, OAGi, OPC, and WBF, was announced today. The
Working Group is the next step in the previous announcement by the Open
Applications Group and ISA-SP95 to converge their standards for
manufacturing interoperability by working to support the OpenO&MTM
Initiative. This group will develop an industry guideline that defines
generic business process models between the operations management and
business layers of the manufacturing support system.
The guideline will be applicable to process, discrete, and mixed-mode
manufacturers. It will reflect a convergence of the manufacturing
interoperability standards work underway within ISA SP95, OAGi, WBF,
MIMOSA, and OPC. The guideline will facilitate development of reusable
integration software components for processes in the form of web
services in an open standard XML format.
“Many enterprises today are struggling with the myriad of standards
available to them and often do not know which standards they should be
using,” said David Connelly, CEO of the Open Applications Group. “Many
of our OAGIS users are using both ISA-95 and OAGIS and we are excited to
participate in this initiative that will simplify their efforts and
provide our customers with a common solution.”
“Delivery of the ISA-95 set of standards will be greatly accelerated by
the customer driven requirements of this collaboration” said Keith
Unger, of Stone Technologies and chair of the ISA-SP95 enterprise
-control system integration committee. “We want to leverage our best
contributors from all of these relevant efforts and provide a better
standard for our customers.”
“In establishing this working group, we are pledging to collaborate in
manufacturing interoperability standards development efforts and apply
the resources of our respective organizations toward a common goal,”
said Maurice Wilkins, Chairman of WBF.
In order to assure that the working group addresses issues that reflect
market need, a Customer Advisory Council has been created. The council
will be composed of representatives from end-user companies in process,
discrete, and mixed-mode manufacturing. The council will collaborate and
agree upon a recommended, prioritized list of business processes
(scenarios) to be addressed by the working group. These business
processes will be documented as simple interface data flows and
prioritized by the council to provide guidance and support to the
working group. The council will identify industry specific needs and
business scenarios with areas of overlap across industries. The group
will work to classify the underlying technologies to support deployment
of standards based software components as Web Services. It will also
explore interoperability standards and guidelines and software
deployment strategies to ensure a viable and unified market opportunity
is available to the software suppliers.
“Broad based support is needed among manufacturing customer
organizations to support standards development and deployment
activities,” said Gary Sullivan of BWXT and chair of the customer
advisory council. “The success of this effort and future development of
standards based software components is dependent upon demonstrating a
strong market need and customer commitment.”
“This end user customer guidance and support is critical, because it can
lead to suppliers implementing the guideline in the form of commercial
product,” said Greg Gorbach of ARC, which has facilitated the creation
of the customer council. “It’s also important that the working group
leverage the customer advisory council to establish appropriate linkages
with vertical industry groups so that the initiative reaches broad
industry segments.”
At this time, ISA, MIMOSA, OAGi, OPC, and WBF are the principal member
organizations of the working group. The initial guideline will be
reflect convergence of the work of ISA, OAGi, and WBF and will be the
basis for future alignment with the OPC Unified Architecture model, the
MIMOSA open systems architecture, and the PackML work of OMAC.
“We look forward to contributing to the work of this group to help
enable standards-based interoperability for operations and maintenance
related applications including the ultimate alignment with our work on
open system architectures for enterprise application integration,” said
MIMOSA President Alan Johnston. Tom Burke, OPC Foundation President,
added, “This working group epitomizes our mission of ensuring
interoperability in automation by creating and maintaining open
specifications.”
The Working Group will meet initially in April, and is striving to issue
interim schemas in 2006 and the guideline by mid-2007. The completed
guideline will be jointly copyrighted by the member organizations, but
will be made available for public use royalty free.