Interoperability standards group formed

The creation of the Manufacturing Interoperability Guideline Working Group, a collaborative venture of ISA, MIMOSA, OAGi, OPC, and WBF, was announced recently. This group will develop an industry guideline that defines generic business process models between the operations management and business layers of the manufacturing support system.

The guideline will be applicable to process, discrete, and mixed-mode manufacturers. It will reflect a convergence of the manufacturing interoperability standards work underway within ISA SP95, OAGi, WBF, MIMOSA, and OPC. The guideline will facilitate development of reusable integration software components for processes in the form of web services in an open standard XML format.

“Many enterprises today are struggling with the myriad of standards available to them and often do not know which standards they should be using,” said David Connelly, CEO of the Open Applications Group. “Many of our OAGIS users are using both ISA-95 and OAGIS and we are excited to participate in this initiative that will simplify their efforts and provide our customers with a common solution.”

“Delivery of the ISA-95 set of standards will be greatly accelerated by the customer driven requirements of this collaboration,” said Keith Unger, of Stone Technologies and chair of the ISA-SP95 enterprise -control system integration committee.

“In establishing this working group, we are pledging to collaborate in manufacturing interoperability standards development efforts and apply the resources of our respective organizations toward a common goal,” said WBF chairman Maurice Wilkins.

“This end user customer guidance and support is critical, because it can lead to suppliers implementing the guideline in the form of commercial product,” said Greg Gorbach of ARC, which has facilitated the creation of the customer council. “It’s also important that the working group leverage the customer advisory council to establish appropriate linkages with vertical industry groups so that the initiative reaches broad industry segments.”

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