Manufacturing companies have invested large amounts of money in industrial automation infrastructures, but many have yet to realize the full value from their investment as many of these infrastructures remain islands of automation; information silos disconnected from other systems, including business systems.
Enormous amounts of data may be available, but very often companies lack the proper infrastructure that would allow them to adequately share data so they can use the information to improve process efficiency and profitability. Integration between process control, plant-level and enterprise systems is no longer an option for manufacturing and energy companies if they want to remain competitive.
Convergence of the IT world with automation and process controls greatly helps this effort by providing economically and technically competitive solutions. However, the sharing of process information within and between networks must be done in a way that aligns with the overall security policies of the enterprise.
This paper will discuss some of the options available for integrating automation islands and for distributing information at any level in the organization. In particular, two main players in the system integration arena will be examined: OLE for Process Control (OPC) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Some drawbacks that such technologies may have will be mentioned and alternative solutions will be explored. Real world examples will be presented to show benefits provided by open architectures.
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