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Keywords: OPA User Testimonials, OPAF Workshop, SMAR Workshop, COPA Demo, OPA Ecosystem, Integration, TCO, Resilience, ARC Advisory Group/
Overview
As the Open Process Automation (OPA) domain keeps evolving quickly, the ARC European forum organized a traditional ARC session with user testimonials on the topic, and hosted an Open Process Automation Forum (OPAF) workshop providing a platform of exchange among the emerging community. The forum also hosted the SMAR hands-on OPA workshop, and the OPA system demo from COPA. The workshops will be covered in a separate report.
OPA Session: User Testimonials
OPAF
Jacco Opmeer from Shell and co-chair of OPAF provided an introduction and an update of the recent and upcoming activities of the Forum. The Forum now has over hundred members, including most major hardware and software suppliers, most major automation system suppliers and many large end users. The organization cultivates strong relationships with other global organizations such as NAMUR, PLCopen, ISA, OPC Foundation and many more. The main achievements in 2023 include the publication of the 2.1 version of the standard, harmonization with NAMUR’s MTP and OPC’s UAFX.
Backed up by pilot and field trial implementations by users, the Forum is confident V2.1 of the standard has sufficient content to build products that can be assembled into OPA systems. V3.x of the standard targets import/export of end user control strategies, support for hierarchies and groups for alarms and event, role-based access control (RBAC) for improved security, application portability and IEC 61131 and 61499 function block standardization.
The main theme for 2024 is “productize, certify and deploy.” Suppliers indicate they have products ready for certification, labs will be announced, and the first certificates are expected in the second half of 2024.
ExxonMobil
Mohan Kalyanaraman from ExxonMobil gave a presentation with many topics. Among the key messages, ExxonMobil informed the audience of a Lighthouse project, which is a first-of-a-kind commercial implementation of an OPA system in a manufacturing plant using components from different vendors further validating the preceding work in testbeds. The implementation provides direct benefits to ExxonMobil but also aims to catalyze the OPA ecosystem and marketplace.
The implementation is of course modular and scalable and uses many modern approaches for the application platform also used in cloud computing. One example is virtualized deployment of applications in Kubernetics-orchestrated components in clusters of containers. A second is a high degree of automation of the application and networking deployment workflows, enabling resilience and repeatability as well as reducing maintenance cost. Security is based on the IEC-62443 standard, and components are expected to be at SL-2 or higher. FIDO secure onboarding, security zones, and conduits to ensure security are implemented to ensure the system is reliable, easy to use and minimize the human intervention and burden in a secure manner. The lighthouse project is expected to start by the end of 2024.
Mr. Kalyanaraman listed the benefits of OPA, as currently perceived:
Decreased lifecycle costs
Reduce barriers to new technology and accelerate application deployment
Secure and adaptable by design
Promote attraction and retention of workforce
Increase innovation in the marketplace
Reuse control applications across systems from multiple suppliers
Allow for standardization of operations and maintenance
It is noteworthy that the benefits related to technical aspects have been stable since the inception of OPA, and that human, business process and ecosystem-related benefits are gradually added.
Mr. Kalyanaraman closed with a call to action to support the development of the standard’s open architecture and design principles, the development of the ecosystem and market, to invest in open systems, and added that ExxonMobil is focused on additional deployments and implementations and continues to contribute by supporting education and awareness.
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