The US National Institute of Standards and technology (NIST) hosted the ‘Open Industrial Digital Ecosystem Summit’ earlier this year at its national cybersecurity center in Rockville, Maryland. The event, sponsored by Mimosa and OAGi, set out to explore supplier neutral, standards-based interoperability to improve operational efficiencies.
Mimosa CTO Markus Stumptner teamed with Matt Selway to present ‘Standardizing standards-based interoperability’ and OIIE, the ‘Open Industrial Interoperability Ecosystem’. OIIE is a ‘framework and architecture for defining and describing standardized and standards-based ways for how systems should interoperate’. It will/should (?) support digitalization and supplier-neutral, COTS/open source plug and play interoperability. OIIE is a ‘refinement’ of concepts that Mimosa has been developing for five years.
OIIE components include a use case architecture, connectivity and services architecture, data and message models along with ecosystem administration functions. The aim is for a supplier-neutral digital ecosystem specialized for process industries (including oil and gas). But, observed Stumptner, ‘The major suppliers of IT infrastructure and industrial applications all want their ecosystem to be the ecosystem!’
The venerable OGI Pilot has been a testbed and proving ground for the OIIE with a focus on EPC to O&M* handover of engineering data. The current pilot phase covers the additional fields of information requirements for greenfield and brownfield data. The OIIE deploys SDAIR, a structured digital asset interoperability register with tag identifiers and mappings. Mimosa CCOM (common conceptual object model) serves as an information model for asset data exchange.
Ken Dunn presented the BP Interoperability Story*. BP is aiming for plug and play exchange of asset and equipment information sans coding such that ‘information need only be entered once, and made available to all stakeholders’. The BP Interoperability Program will deliver integrity of asset information across a wide range of operations systems and partners through collaboration with software vendors and other owner operators, driving adoption of the OIIE. BP is planning OIIE production deployment asap using the OGI Pilot environment. Key bricks in BP’s asset O&M landscape are SAP’s assent intelligence network (AIN). This is connected to engineering tools, notably from Bentley and Yokogawa using the OIIE CCOM protocol. The OIIE SDAIR (structured digital interoperability registry) captures the current state of plant assets. BP is to sponsor the next phase of the OGI Pilot, working with Yokogawa, Bentley and SAP to develop the architecture and implement a minimum viable product. Dunn concluded that ‘there are too many overlapping information standards in the oil and gas industry, most of which are not broadly adopted’. A dozen or so owner operators have established the ISSC, the information standards sub-committee of the IOGP, to provide a ‘unified voice’ of the industry on information standards and to help with adoption.
OAGi Board Chairman Garret Minakawa introduced a new strategic initiative, the Industrial Ontologies Foundry (IOF), a group that is working to create a set of open ontologies to support manufacturing and engineering industry needs and advance data interoperability. More on the IOF in our report on the 2019 Industrial Ontologies workshop elsewhere in this issue.
Open Applications Group VP operations, Michael Figura observed that the Oagis standard can be a ‘little intimidating, especially for small organizations’. Enter OAGIS* Lite, a slimmed-down version of the standard which can be subsequently upgraded ‘with zero rework’. OAGIS Lite will leverage a subset of the most popular BODs (business object documents). Instead of some 1,200+ BOD schemas there are 5 to 10 and documentation is ‘smaller and more approachable’.
* In fact, Dunn’s presentation was not available at the time of writing. This short summary has been taken from a presentation made to Mimosa in December 2018.
* Open Applications Group Information Standard.
* EPC engineering prime contractor. O&M operations and maintenance.
© Oil IT Journal - all rights reserved.