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Time to read: 7 minutes  Posted by John Harrington The Unified Namespace (UNS) architecture pattern has proven to be an effective means to opening industrial data access up to the entire business, but the road to implementation is not without a few speed bumps.
First, as industrial companies start to establish their hierarchy and build their UNS, they may find it difficult to get their data to follow their own rules. By its nature, UNS architecture draws from a multitude of different data sources, most of which present data in unique formats. Even superficially similar assets can format the data they generate in completely unique ways, and differences in data generated by wholly different machines, systems, and PLCs are even more stark. To limit problems in creating and operating a UNS, some industrial companies simply publish data from each system and device directly to an MQTT broker in their own topic namespace. This practice is not truly a UNS, and it offers little of the data accessibility and usability promised by this architectural pattern. Second, the UNS topic space typically follows the hierarchy: Site, Area, Line, Zone, Cell, and Asset. At each level, the information may include data from multiple systems including PLCs, SCADA, MES, CMMS, QMS, ERP, etc. On the consuming side, many users have unique needs that the UNS alone may not be able to meet. These challenges are what make consistent, easily scalable abstraction a critical part of your UNS. Time to read: 7 minutes Posted by John Harrington The Unified Namespace (UNS) is among the fastest-growing data architecture patterns for Industry 4.0, promising easy publish-subscribe access to hierarchically structured industrial data. At HighByte, we define a UNS as a consolidated, abstracted structure by which all business applications can consume real-time industrial data in a consistent manner. A UNS allows you to combine multiple values into a single, structured logical model that can be understood by business users across the enterprise to make real-time decisions.
But many industrials are finding that though they’ve loaded their device telemetry data in their UNS, they are struggling to use it. The UNS’ uniform data standards, hierarchical structure, and publish-subscribe pattern do an excellent job of providing easy, logical access to data, but business and analytics users often discover that they must subscribe to multiple data streams from separate levels of the hierarchy to get what they need for their applications. There are two problems with this approach: Time to read: 7 minutes  Posted by John Harrington The efforts of standards organizations like OPC Foundation, Eclipse Foundation (Sparkplug), ISA, CESMII, and MTConnect represent a significant step forward for the advancement of Industry 4.0 in manufacturing.
But industry standards only go so far. Businesses need data to tell the story of what is happening, why it is happening, and how to fix it. Multiple pieces of information must be assembled with other pieces of information from other sources to tell the use case story—just like words must be combined into sentences and sentences combined to form stories. Data standards can’t tell the use case story—they can only provide a dictionary. Standardizing the device-level data into structures is key, but only the beginning. Data standards alone will not solve your interoperability problems because they don’t provide the use case related context you need to make strategic decisions. Here are four key reasons why you still need an Industrial DataOps solution like the Intelligence Hub—even with the introduction or evolution of new standards. Time to read: 6 minutes Posted by John Harrington Data modeling is all about standardization. It enables interoperability, shows intent, determines trust, and ensures proper data governance. Given the criticality of usable data at scale for Industry 4.0, many manufacturers have turned to ISA-95—probably the most commonly recognized data-modeling standard around the world—for guidance.
Created by a standards committee at the International Society of Automation, the ISA-95 specification defines in detail the electronic information exchange between manufacturing control functions and other enterprise functions, including data models and exchange definitions. The purpose of ISA-95 is “to create a standard that will define the interface between control functions and other enterprise functions based upon the Purdue Reference Model”. Per the committee, the goal is to reduce the risk, cost, and errors associated with system integration. Historically, ISA-95 has been the guide for many off-the-shelf and bespoke manufacturing execution systems (MES). Today, ISA-95 also helps industrial organizations implement data integrations that link MES, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, IIoT platforms, data lakes, and analytics solutions. It also eases the implementation of a unified namespace (UNS) for enterprise data integration. The specification defines a hierarchal model for systems, detailed information models, and a data flow model for manufacturing operations management (MOM). Let’s take a look at these 3 key attributes in more detail and uncover how the ISA-95 specification can be applied within HighByte Intelligence Hub. |
