Open Process Automation Session, Workshops and Demo at the ARC European Forum

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 for exchange among the emerging community. The forum also hosted the SMAR hands-on OPA workshop, and the OPA system demo from COPA. This Insight reports on the workshops. A separate Insight discusses the user presentations during the OPA Session, which featured amongst others, presentations by OPAF and ExxonMobil with introductory content. 

OPAF Workshop

Also this year, the Open Process Automation Forum organized a workshop led by Mohan Kalyanaraman from ExxonMobil, providing a platform for the emerging OPA ecosystem. 

COPA

Don Bartusiak, President of Collaborative Systems Integration (CSI) and a co-leader of the Coalition for Open Process Automation (COPA) discussed three topics. COPA is a collection of process control hardware and software suppliers, system integrators, and service providers who are leading the charge to commercialize OPA systems. The first topic was about software-defined high availability in OPA systems. Mr. Bartusiak illustrated the point with a software-defined hot-switch-over strategy among two compute distributed control nodes (DCN) and an advanced computing platform (ACP). In the event of failure of the DCN running the control strategy (primary runtime), the control strategy is transferred “bumplessly” (with complete state information) in one execution cycle to a secondary runtime running either on the second DCN or the ACP by the OPA system orchestrator software agent. Two enabling components make software-defined high-availability possible: (1) OPC UA global discovery service (GDS) and (2) the OPA system orchestration agent. The sources and destinations of data in a system are registered in the GDS, and when the source or destination of data changes, such as for the software-defined high-availability process, continuity of dataflow is maintained throughout the dynamic restructuring of the system components. 

For the OPA system orchestration function, CPLANE.ai redundancy agents running on the DCNs monitor the DCN states and switch over to a secondary DCN or ACP virtual machine in case of failure. The CPLANE.ai replication agent makes sure the secondaries are updated with the latest operational state of the failed DCN. The strength of the solution is that one is not limited to hardware-defined pair-wise redundancy, but that a few underloaded nodes could pick up workloads of other nodes on an as-needed basis, for planned or unplanned hardware, software and firmware events. 

Mr. Bartusiak also presented on distributed, multi-vendor control apps, in which a regulatory control strategy for a fired heater process was implemented in three separate runtimes from two suppliers (CODESYS and SMAR) distributed across two different DCNs (ASRock and Supermicro). Key enablers in this solution are the OPC-UA information models for O-PAS and the O-PAS inter-function block communication interface.

The last topic was the O-PAS – MTP integration, that we reported on in this blog. The audience applauded the presentation as a “Master Class.”

OPA Technology Providers

Ravindra Jasagia explained the O-PAS-compliant offering of R.Stahl for DCNs and IO modules. Options for deployment can be using combined or separate DCN and IO, combined with third party vendor DCNs in the Advanced Compute Platform, all running either IEC 61131 or IEC 61499 runtimes. The modules are explosion safe for Zone 2, potentially connected with sensors or actuators in Zone 1. R. Stahl hardware has been used in several O-PAS demos, and recently ExxonMobil placed an order for the hardware for the ExxonMobil Lighthouse project (see above).

Sam Chiu from ASRock presented the company’s edge compute platform. ASRock has rugged industrial PCs with smaller and larger Intel-based processors, as well as NVIDIA-based machines. These are O-PAS ready, IEC 62443-4-1 and 62663-4-2 certification ongoing, and prepared for IEC-61499 implementation.

Luciano Botto presented the Nova-SMAR roadshow and hands-on workshop, which we report on below. 

Mark Hammer from Yokogawa’s US Technology Center positioned Yokogawa’s software components for O-PAS-compliant architectures. Yokogawa is an active contributor to O-PAS standardization, and one of the first integrators managing field trials and providing OPA system integration services. Yokogawa has components in the process management domain. In the control layer Yokogawa provides OPC-UA OPA servers for IO field devices (IO DCN), and OPC-UA OPA servers with alarming for DCNs (edge controllers/computers, compute DCN), and in the advanced computing platform (ACP) the company provides alarm configuration, global discovery servers (GDS) and function blocks used in the programming. 

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

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