The OpenO&M™ For Manufacturing Joint Working Group announce a collaborative publication entitled Condition Based Operations For Manufacturing. The paper defines their shared vision for Condition Based Operations (CBO). In manufacturing, CBO enables operational planning and scheduling to be accomplished in conjunction with a forecast of actual availability and capability of assets in the critical path. This enables production planners and operations staff to establish economically optimal production plans, empowering them to directly contribute to the economic goals of the enterprise.
The OpenO&M For Manufacturing Joint Working Group, formed by the Instrumentation Systems and Automation Society (ISA), MIMOSA (An Operations and Maintenance Open Systems Alliance) and OPC Foundation (OPC) announced its formation at ISA EXPO 2003. The mission of the joint working group is to enable open and interoperable O&M solutions spanning from the factory floor through the enterprise. The OpenO&M For Manufacturing Joint Working Group will harmonize standards from participating organizations enabling practical interoperability amongst the many required devices, tools and systems in a vendor, product and platform neutral basis.
While the Joint Working Group anticipates a broad range of valuable by-products from the collaboration, this initial white paper focuses on CBO for manufacturing that requires the effective integration of a broad variety of O&M information. The human analogy is the need to know the health prognosis of specific individuals, not just averages for humans of a similar age. A human that is considered to be in the critical path for many important activities will normally have comprehensive and continuous efforts to monitor their health, prognoses it and risk manage it through a variety of forms of insurance, redundancies or other compensating strategies that are now taken for granted. CBO enables a similar discipline for critical path assets in all types of asset intensive applications including manufacturing. It requires the near real-time fusion of large amounts of data, information and knowledge from a wide variety of dissimilar multivendor systems. This type of complex and dynamic systems integration is best facilitated through the use of open information standards such as those being harmonized by the OpenO&M For Manufacturing Joint Working Group.
Keith Unger, ISA SP95 Committee Chair said: “I am extremely pleased that this collaborative effort has finished the first deliverable. The SP95 committee is just beginning its work on Part 4 of the ANSI/ISA S95 standard and I expect the SP95 committee will be able to build on the OpenO&M™ initiative and complete the standard effort much more quickly then we would have by working alone.”
Thomas Burke, OPC Foundation President and Executive Director said: “The OPC Foundation is excited to be part of this joint working group. OPC is the process industry open standard for accessing real-time plant floor information from a wide variety of measurement and control systems. This collaboration is key to delivering seamless integration of operations and asset management information from the plant across the enterprise.”
Alan Johnston, MIMOSA President said: “I am excited to see this first deliverable expressing a joint vision for CBO in manufacturing, but I am even more pleased to see the associated standards harmonization work that will enable the development of CBO and other O&M solutions based on our open information standards. The collaborative development of reference implementation models leveraging our harmonized standards is a key step in the process of establishing systems that provide more effective enterprise integration spanning from the factory floor to the boardroom.”
