Chevron hosted a gathering of standards bodies last month working in the field of oil and gas plant and process engineering. Billed as the OpenO&M/MIMOSA and PCA Forum (Americas) the event also rolled in automations standards from OPC-UA. The event was billed as focusing on the benefits of using OpenO&M and ISO 15926 in a ‘coordinated fashion.’ A tough call given the considerable differences and overlap between these two independently developed solutions to what is essentially the same problem.
Alan Johnston of the OpenO&M and Mimosa Consortia offered a perspective on interoperability for critical infrastructure including energy and chemicals facilities. Johnston noted the different perspectives (and standards deployed) in capital projects and operations and maintenance. He went on to problem statement—of multiple non communicating systems and temporal (handover) barriers and the case for standards. Large enterprises are now spending 15 times the cost of license fees on integration efforts. A standards-based interoperability model will ‘dramatically reduce these direct costs.’
What is needed is an ‘open information management architecture’ comprising a reference information environment and an execution environment. So that nobody is left out, Johnson suggests that ISO 15926 should be the principal standard for reference information with OpenO&M the execution environment. Over time, the complex equipment models will be stored in 15926, but right now OpenO&M’s registries, schema and services are how the execution environment actually works. This gives a ‘pragmatic way of moving forward from where we are to where we want to be in an incremental and risk managed fashion.’ An open event-oriented message bus provides ‘platform neutral’ messaging between OpenO&M and the 15926 environment. Notwithstanding Johnston’s positive spin, the integration slideware is not for the faint of heart. Now Mimosa, OpenO&M Fiatech, PCA, IBM and the Australian CIEAM have begun collaboration on ‘improved approaches to open standards-based interoperability for asset management through an industry use-case driven solutions process.’ All under the auspices of yet another ISO—TC184.
Mimosa CTO Ken Bever provided a technology overview of Mimosa’s open system architecture for enterprise application integration (OSA-EAI). This is an attempt to address the O&M problem with an ‘open, unambiguous data language’ coupled with a ‘standards-based abstraction and integration layer.’ The Mimosa OSA for condition based maintenance (OSA-CBM) also ran.
Clifford Pedersen, CIO of Northwest Upgraders and Mimosa director, outlined a ‘use case’ or what will be one when deployed, of OpenO&M at a Canadian heavy oil upgrader. The plan is to leverage Mimosa across construction, handover, upgrades and on to O&M including ‘semi-automatic triggering of condition based maintenance and early warning notifications. Pedersen observed that ‘no single standard has broad support for capturing all of the required process, structural, mechanical, electrical, electronic and software information elements. This means that multiple engineering reference standards are likely to continue to evolve in order to solve the entire problem and that much of the information is still being managed either through proprietary extensions to a standard or through completely proprietary means.’ Pedersen’s vision for the The Northwest Information Management System (NIMS) is of Mimosa, ISA-95 and OPC used together to support M&O—with OPC UA as the ‘data pipe.’ What is needed is an ‘open architecture solution that integrates process/operational, maintenance, and business systems, applications and processes that can be used by everybody, not more research!’ The proposed solution is ‘field proven’ as it was used in BP’s ‘eRTIS’ downstream enterprise portal. To make this work, software vendors will have to write adapters to ‘talk’ OpenO&M.
Ian Glendinning (Glenco Information Services) has provided us with the following from his presentation on the ISO15926/Joint Operational Reference Data (JORD). ISO15926 users are dependent on well managed reference data. JORD kicked off in 2010 with a ‘front-end’ project to scope out a scalable and sustainable business model that could support JORD delivery. In February 2011 the PCA and FIATECH boards agreed on JORD Phase with a kick-off meeting planned for May 2011. Harmonization with other standards like Mimosa is achievable by collaboration, without the need to merge them into ISO15926. Harmonization of Mimosa/OpenO&M with ISO15926 will depend on accessible reference data and will therefore mandate successful execution of the JORD project. More from www.oilit.com/links/1103_34.
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