“Federation“ what does it mean in context of Industrial Automation/ Operations Mgmt System?

One of the 3 fundamental principles of the Enterprise Control is to unify a plants or multi plants assets and systems, through “Federation” vs “rip and Replace”, while I use the term often I also get blank looks. So let me explain how I see it!.

Federation is the unifying/ aligning of existing systems/ plants, assets into unified system, leveraging the existing systems/ models that exist, so “loosely coupling but aligning”. This goes beyond just data, but configuration models, alarms, events, data etc, you should be able to have a unified, comparable information model across many sites made up of different systems without changing the existing systems.

I was talking with a system integration house last week about the topic of last week’s blog, and how the traditional approach is the data centric model, he talked about having to spend a significant amount of time redoing the PLC / control systems which are the data sources, in order to make sure the data being put into the historian is in context, of the same calibration etc. While this approach is effective, it is costly and risky to exiting control systems. The concept of System Platform as a pre normalizing data model, with the added advantage of template management to enable standards management without risk to existing systems seams very logical. This is a classic case of “Federation” of existing control system models into a unified system without changing/ risking the existing system. By layering on this layer using the template model to built “intelligent objects, with not just structure but context validation, KPIs and exception based driven events.

I was also speaking to one end-user discussing the evolution of Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) a big drive to S95/ B2MML. He made the comment that in the early 2000’s the focus was on Business System to Level3 systems, the amount time and effort we spent discussing how to come up with standards etc. But he stated that we were only addressing 10% of the integration challenge in a modern plant by talking to business system. In a modern agile plant it is all about decisions in the NOW, changing and adapting the operations and this means alignment of the many different systems that make up “day in the life” of operations execution on an industrial plant.

Sitting back I went to a couple of other customers that I had worked closely in the “inter-operability workshops” and they confirmed this shift, also the fact that they had hoped that they could put a single MES system that be master across operations, but had come to the conclusion there will always be many systems adding unique aspects of value to plant execution.

This diagram depicts how with the drive for agility comes the necessity for the different systems in a plant to be interacting, and this explodes as you move to making multiple plants become an agile execution chain. Each of these systems has a unique data model, for assets, materials, people etc. These many systems will have come from different companies and certainly standardization will rare if you have acquired production facilities.

In today’s market this is going from transactions in days/ hours to real-time, which cannot be done through the operational people, it must be done automatically by the systems. An example of this “federation” could be multiple Assets being aligned, eg you have different System Platform galaxies for different process units, now these different system Platform galaxies need to work together, yet we do not want merge into one galaxy as it becomes unmanageable. So we will leave each galaxy to run on their own, but through federation, there is unification of events, data passing, alarms, even object standards.

A significant investment is constantly happening to simplify the tasks to “federate” and maintain effective “federation” of our systems/ products, and with others, so that customers can evolve their existing systems forward with new value vs replacing with new systems.

This is a set of thoughts on a lot of concepts, but generally we need to align existing systems into a unified solution to enable co-ordination of the many assets as one.