(109f) Keynote Talk - Platforms and Algorithms for Digitally-Enabled Next-Gen Manufacturing

Current initiatives calling for a significant increase in the degree of computing and communications networking technologies used to automate and optimize manufacturing can be traced to the 2011 – 2015 time period. The phrase “Industrie 4.0” was coined Wolfgang Wahlster and first used at the 2011 Hannover Fair in Germany (Kagermann, et al. (2011)). The phrase “Fourth Industrial Revolution” was defined in 2015 by Klaus Schwab (Schwab (2015)) and was used as the theme for the 2016 World Economic Forum Annual Meeting at Davos.

During the same time period, operating companies, notably ExxonMobil, issued a call for fundamental changes to the state-of-the-art of industrial control systems to address “pain points” including (1) a lack of interoperability between systems from different suppliers, (2) unacceptably high
costs for upgrades or replacements compared to other computing systems, and (3) restrictions on business value generation caused by barriers to insertion of third-party technology innovations (Bartusiak, et al. (2015)). This call to action resulted in the establishment of the Open Process
Automation Forum of The Open Group in 2016 that is working to establish the industry standards for an open, secure, interoperable process automation architecture (https://www.opengroup.org/forum/open-process-automation-forum). The intent of the Open Process Automation Standard is to solve the identified industrial control system pain points and to enable realization of the vision of Industrie 4.0 and the Fourth Industrial Revolution for manufacturing.

Central to the Open Process Automation and Industrie 4.0 visions is a step-change increase in the pace of innovation with technologies including applied artificial intelligence, big data, and data analytics applied to manufacturing compared to the status quo with current industrial control system products that are of a closed, proprietary nature. Explicitly, one of the intentions of Open Process Automation is to increase opportunities for academic researchers and other technology providers to get their research transferred to industrial practice by reducing commercial barriers and the time it takes to deploy new technology.

In this talk, we will provide updates on the status of the Open Process Automation Standard (O-PAS), industrial prototypes of O-PAS based systems (Bartusiak, et al. (2021)), O-PAS conformance certification, and the state of Open Process Automation business ecosystem building. This will include guidance to academic researchers on how they can leverage the O-PAS Standard to facilitate the adoption of their research. We will comment on the relationships among Open Process Automation, Industrie 4.0, and similar initiatives -- such as the Clean Energy Smart Manufacturing Innovation Institute (CESMII) (Edgar and Pristikopoulis EN. (2018)), Manufacturing x Digital (MxD) (https://www.mxdusa.org), NAMUR Open Architecture (Klettner, et al. (2017)), and NAMUR Module Type Package (Bernshausen, et al. (2016)). Finally, we will comment on our outlook for new process systems engineering technologies -- including applied artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data, and data analytics -- to enable next-gen manufacturing efficiency.

References

Bartusiak RD, Bitar S, DeBari DL, Patin DL, Balsubramanian M, Foltz D, Caro RL, Brandl DL. (2015), “Functional Requirements for an Open Architecture Industrial Control System: Part 2 – What We Want”. ExxonMobil Research and Engineering Technical Report.

Bartusiak RD, Bitar S, DeBari DL, Houk BG, Stevens D, Fitzpatrick B, Sloan P. (2021). “Open Process Automation: A standards-based, open, secure, interoperable process control architecture”. Proc. 2021 IFAC World Congress.

Bernshausen J, Haller A, Holm, T, Hoernicke M, Obst, M, Ladiges J. (2016). “Namur Modul Type Package -- Definition”. atp-magazin 58(1-2):72-81.

Edgar TF, Pistikopolous EN. (2018). “Clean Energy Smart Manufacturing Innovation Institute”, Comp. Chem. Eng. 114:130-144.

Kagermann H, Lukas W-D, Wahlster W. (2011). “Industrie 4.0”. VDI nachrichten. https://web.archive.org/web/20130304101009/http://www.vdi-nachrichten.co...

Klettner C, Tauchnitz T, Epple U, Northdurft L, Diedrich C, Schroeder T, Grossmann D, Banerjee S, Krauss M, Iatrou C, Urbas L. (2017). “Namur Open Architecture”. atp-magazin 59(1-2):20-37.

Schwab K. (2015). “The Fourth Industrial Revolution”. Foreign Affairs. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/the-fourthindustrial-revolution-w...