Chemical Engineering May 2023 - 36

Feature Report
Industry Adoption of
Open Process Automation
Presented here is a description of the Open Process Automation Standard and a
progress report on its implementation by industry
R. Donald
Bartusiak
Collaborative Systems
Integration, Inc.
IN BRIEF
OPA OVERVIEW
INDICATORS OF
INDUSTRY ADOPTION
EXAMPLE: COPA
QUICKSTART
CONCLUDING REMARKS
O
pen Process Automation (OPA) is
an end-user company-driven industry
movement to transform the
industrial
control-system market
from one that supplies closed, proprietary
products to another that supplies open, secure,
interoperable systems derived from a
standards-based automation architecture.
OPA addresses the root causes of end-user
pain points. The top three business drivers
for end-users companies are the following:
1. Increase operational benefits from improved
capabilities
2. Improve cybersecurity compared to currently
available systems
3. Reduce the system's capital and lifecycle
costs
OPA is primarily targeted at the chemical
process industries (CPI) - continuous,
semi-continuous and batch - across multiple
industry sectors.
OPA is based on an industry standard (OPAS)
that is being defined by the Open Process
Automation Forum of The Open Group
(OPAF). The business case for action, mechanisms
of value generation, and discussions
of stakeholder concerns are documented
in the Open Process Automation Business
Guide [1]. A more detailed discussion of concerns
and next steps towards OPA
for end-user and system-integrator
companies is provided in the OPA
Adoption Guide [2]. (An extension
for the OPA Adoption Guide for
supplier and service provider companies
is currently being written).
To make the business problem
real, particularly for end-user readers,
one of the specific motivations
for the OPA initiative was to find a
game-changing improvement to
the prospect of hundreds-of-million-dollar
costs per manufacturing
site for control-system upgrade
projects that offered little, if any, return
on investment.
In this article, we first provide a
36
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6 (.1 - .6)
brief overview of the Open Process Automation
Standard (O-PAS), the business ecosystem,
and conformance certification of
products to the O-PAS standard. Second,
information on the maturity and industry
adoption of OPA is presented. Third, an example
of a commercially available OPA system,
QuickStart from the Coalition for Open
Process Automation (COPA), is discussed.
OPA overview
The Open Process Automation Forum was
founded in November 2016 and currently
consists of 112 member organizations - end
user, hardware and software supplier (including
all but one of the major distributed control
system (DCS) and programmable logic controller
(PLC) vendors), and system-integrator
companies, as well as several universities.
OPAF also has liaison relationships with
standards organizations and industry associations,
including NAMUR, OPC Foundation,
Control System Integrators Association, International
Society for Automation, and others.
The OPA reference architecture is presented
in Figure 1. The three essential object
types in the OPA architecture are (1) Distributed
Control Node (DCN) with input/output
(I/O) Node, Compute Node and Gateway
TABLE 1. O-PAS PART DOCUMENTS, SUBJECT MATTER AND
REFERENCED INDUSTRY STANDARDS
O-PAS Part
Subject matter
Technical architecture
Security
Profiles
Referenced standard
IEC 62264 (ISA 95)
IEC 62449 (ISA 99)
not applicable
Connectivity framework IEC 62541 (OPC UA)
System management
DMTF (Redfish)
Information and
exchange models
Part 7
Part 8 (future)
Part 9 (future)
Physical platform
Application portability
System orchestration
IEC 62714 (AutomationML)
IEC 62682 (ISA 18)
IEC 61131
IEC 61499
" whitespace " , PCMIG
containerization
OASIS (TOSCA)
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