“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.