User and Provider Views of OPA at European Industry Forum

Overview

ARC held its third virtual European Industry Forum on May 17 and 18. Two sessions were devoted to Open Process Automation (OPA): one gave end users the opportunity to speak about their approaches and progress in planning and implementing OPA; the second was a panel discussion with major service and technology providers about OPA business opportunities.   

OPA User Session

The session was kicked off by Andreas Schüller of Yncoris, representative of the NAMUR working group “Information Management and Tools,” about the importance of standardized information models for digitalization. We need information models to be able to communicate efficiently among multiple stakeholders within a company and with external partners, along the asset lifecycle and the supply chain. When using a commonly agreed-up structure and semantics, that is, an information model, the data transmitted are contextualized in a standard manner, and become understandable for humans and exploitable for software applications. To be precise, an information model is a conceptual version, and a data model is an implementation of such a model.  Applying this to digital twins applied to the realms of engineering design, operational engineering, or operations and maintenance, a common data model will greatly facilitate and speedup reuse and exchange of those twins.   When using an information platform with standardized information model, many applications can benefit from shared (parts of) digital twins, using a limited number of connectors. NAMUR has the goal of building a unified operations data platform using a harmonized standard asset lifecycle information model, “ALC,” that ARC reported about earlier.

Mr. Schüller discussed the role of information models in structuring the submodels of the Asset Administration Shell, and the different variations these will have along the asset lifecycle, for example distinguishing a design parameter value from the value a particular equipment instance may have when installed in the plant. Comparison of the two can be very useful for operations and maintenance personnel to check plant conformance with design specifications and avoid “specification inflation” over time. Static parts of the Asset Administration Shells (AAS) could be used in the future in process automation to store asset information, asset topology or asset functions, similar to the module type package standards (MTP) and dynamic parts of the AAS could store maintenance and real-time operational information.

Jacco Opmeer from  Shell Global Solutions introduced OPA, emphasized the broad membership of OPA Forum (OPAF), and the progress in defining the standard (OPAS). Standard parts have been defined for interoperability, base configuration, and function blocks. This is expected to trigger hardware and software development for new system components, the Distributed Control Nodes (DCN) and the Advanced Compute Platform (ACP). Configuration and application portability will be tackled next. Beyond work on technology, OPAF also works on enterprise architecture, certification, and business aspects. 

Ryan Smeltzer from ExxonMobil explained that the company sets as goal that all industrial control system projects conform to OPAS and that as a result the company expects business benefits from:

• Exploiting new technology sooner because of a lower insertion cost
• Enable the reuse and replication of applications based on interoperability
• Improved data access
• Reduced system cost

• Cheaper, better, and more adaptable ICS and remote support

ARC Advisory Group clients can view the complete report at  ARC Client Portal  

If you would like to buy this report or obtain information about how to become a client, please  Contact Us

Keywords: ARC European Industry Forum, Information Model, Standards, Open Process Automation (OPA), Equinor, Shell, ExxonMobil, Yncoris, Field Test, Andritz, Schneider Electric, Siemens, Yokogawa, CSI, ARC Advisory Group.