ODVA has announced the availability of a new white paper, Optimization of Machine Integration (OMI), which outlines a strategic vision for an open and interoperable communication framework in the industrial sector. For machine builders, OMI provides opportunities for creating additional value through simplified communication between machines and from machines to supervisory systems.
"By transforming data into information, OMI will provide tools for dynamic decision-making, thus maximizing machine productivity, improving machine performance and enhancing the preventive maintenance of machinery assets," said Katherine Voss, executive director, ODVA. "As a result, OMI will create more value for their machines, extend machinery life cycles, and will emerge as a natural sweet spot to help end users meet their overall business objectives, including workforce, profitability and sustainability goals."
This white paper is a collaborative effort by ODVA, Sercos International and the OPC Foundation. All three organizations support a shared vision for machinery integration. ODVA envisions an interoperability framework for machinery that encompasses three domains of the industrial ecosystem - production, enterprise and power grid. This vision recognizes the value of communication in machinery control for production processes, while highlighting the possibility of using machinery information, such as energy metrics and safety factors, as a shared resource and common currency across the domains critical to manufacturers.
The OPC Foundation is dedicated to creating and maintaining open specifications that standardize the secure communication and analysis of process data, alarm and event records, historical data, and batch data to multi-vendor enterprise systems and between production devices. Sercos International, meanwhile, is dedicated to interconnecting motion controls, drives, I/O, sensors and actuators for motion controlled machines and systems.
"The diversity of automation technologies requires a new conceptual approach in order to simplify the integration of machines in production," said Peter Lutz, managing director of Sercos International. "We expect substantial technical and market synergies by cooperating with the ODVA and the OPC Foundation for the benefit of users and suppliers."
"OMI is all about advancing interoperability and providing standardized information integration for anything and everything related to machinery assets. OMI provides the infrastructure and tools necessary to meet and exceed the end-user's expectations to truly maximize their operations for real-time information being exchanged for productivity, performance and maintenance," said Thomas Burke, executive director of the OPC Foundation. "The OPC Foundation partnership with ODVA and Sercos International uses the existing specifications and technology from all three of the cooperating consortiums and leverages each organization's already successful adopted standards for rapid deployment of OMI."
In the white paper, ODVA, Sercos International and the OPC Foundation describe the opportunity to optimize machinery integration for the manufacturing sector and provide an overview of an open, unified integration model for machinery communication including:
• Machinery in the industrial ecosystem;
• A shared vision of machinery in the Production domain;
• Industrial use cases for OMI; and
• OMI in practice.
