Maintenance Technology August 2017 - 35

INDUSTRIAL INTERNET OF THINGS

Companies Focus on
IIoT Networking

old on to your plant-floor
tablets. The wave of
change to sign off on
Executives
large and small IIoT
need
initiatives from maintenance
assistance
technicians is being felt by
in approving
corporate management.
pilot IIoT
An ex-Kraft Foods plant
projects.
manager-turned colleague
says, "It's going to get bloody."
The heart of the challenge for
the past decade has involved quick
transfer of critical plant data to operators, maintenance personnel, and plant
management. For some time, industrial networking
and interoperable plant-floor platforms prevented
data exchanges that provided actionable items for
operators and managers.
Advances in industrial networking technologies,
however, including encrypted messaging based
don the industry operability standard OPC UA
(opcfoundation.org), has moved manufacturers
to data solutions that don't involve ripping out
existing infrastructure. Also, ISA-95 has provided a
standardized interface process for moving control
data from the plant floor, i.e., from manufacturing
execution systems (MES) to business enterprises.
According to Charlie Gifford, senior advanced
manufacturing consultant and contributing member
of the ISA-95 Manufacturing Operations Management Working Group, "As explained at the recent
ISA-95/International Electrotechnical Commission
(IEC) meeting, BHP Billiton presented the application of ISA-95 as a corporate Industrie 4.0 standard
and how they invested $2 million (US) dollars in the
upgrade of ISA-95."
As part of the smart manufacturing initiative
within ISA-95, major updates include Parts 2, 4, and
5, along with the new standards for Parts 8 and 9,
the smart manufacturing framework. In conjunction with this effort, the ISA-95 Process-Centric
Message Working Group created an "event-driven
architecture" for IIoT applications that decreases
data movement between systems.
"If I send an order to the quality lab using the
typical request-response messaging approach, there
can be anywhere from four to ten messages sent as
part of request-response messages," said Gifford.
AUGUST 2017

Grant Gerke
"This new operations event model
Contributing Editor
bundles all changed objects into a
single self-describing message,
which is published using the
new notification model in the
Part 5 update."
In a recent ProFood article
(bit.ly/mtiiot004), Gifford
noted the Process-Centric
Message group is now
identifying 20 to 30 common
operation events (Level 3) in the
new Part 9 of the ISA-95 standard.
"Those common 30 Level 3 operation
events-dispatching production, scheduling,
reliability, etc.-we're defining the data sets and
objects, so when those events occur, I simply publish
the whole block of information for the event in one
message," he explained.
The new operations-event model and
Part 9 standard also apply to maintenance
scheduling, dispatch, and tracking work in
'For The Long
progress. For example, a work-completed
Haul'
event would be published by the enterprise
asset management (EAM) system and
According to the recently
received by enterprise resource planning
released Price Water(ERP), plant scheduling, and MES to inform
house Coopers' (PwC)
those applications that the equipment
"Digital Factories 2020"
resource is in an available state with a given
study, respondents this
capability and capacity. These updates could
year don't seem to be
be final by Dec. 2017.
looking for quick fixes
from IIoT projects. They're
While plant personnel sift through new
"in it for the long haul,"
standards for Industrie 4.0, executives need
expecting to see a return
assistance in approving IIoT pilot projects. "As
on investments over the
you're designing a project or a transformanext two to five years,
tion, you want to design in some early wins,
wrote Reinhard Geisseven if they're simple and small," said Robert
bauer, head of PwC's
MacNeil, senior technical advisor, Nova Scotia
Industry 4.0 in Europe in
Power (nspower.ca, Halifax) at the 2017 ARC
a recent blog post. For a
Industry Forum. MT
breakdown by sector, go

-ggerke@maintenancetechnology.com

to bit.ly/mt2020dig.

The Internet of Things is changing the maintenance
and reliability world. Keep up to date with our
ongoing coverage of this exciting use of data and
technology at maintenancetechnology.com/iot.
MAINTENANCETECHNOLOGY.COM | 35

http://www.bit.ly/mtiiot004 http://www.opcfoundation.org http://www.nspower.ca http://www.bit.ly/mt2020dig http://www.maintenancetechnology.com/iot http://www.MAINTENANCETECHNOLOGY.COM

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