Focus on Digital Transformation & OPA Initiative
Published on : Monday 30-11--0001
ARC Advisory Group’s 22nd Annual Industry Forum in Orlando, Florida from February 12-15, 2018 saw record attendance, with more than 920 attendees from 350 different companies and 25 countries. This year’s Forum featured six different dedicated tracks, 48 sessions, and 180 executive speakers. The keynote addresses included well-received presentations by Kenny Warren from ExxonMobil Research & Engineering and Jason Handley from Duke Energy. Mr Warren provided an update on the Open Process Automation (OPA) initiative and Mr Handley discussed his company’s ongoing smart grid initiative to help enable it to become more customer-centric. ARC’s Andy Chatha then provided a thought-provoking perspective on related technology trends, including platforms for digital transformation.
These three keynotes were preceded by a full day of well-attended workshops on industrial cybersecurity and asset performance management, major press announcements by Forum sponsors, and the inaugural meeting of the end user Digital Transformation Council, which drew more than 70 end users from many different operating companies.
Update on Open Process Automation
Kenny Warren, Vice President of Engineering at ExxonMobil Research & Engineering, began his keynote address with a quote from Steve Jobs: “Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.” This relates to the company’s efforts to encourage innovation in engineering and provides insight into why ExxonMobil initiated the bold attempt to upend the industrial automation space with the Open Process Automation (OPA) initiative, first announced at the 2017 ARC Industry Forum in Orlando.
He spoke about the vision for OPA as a standards-based, open, interoperable and secure process automation architecture, commercially available to all companies. He then explained the status of the three related activity tracks: 1. Develop a proof-of-concept, 2. Adopt appropriate industry standards, and 3. Collaboratively develop solutions and perform field trials.
Of these, the proof-of-concept prototype work performed under contract with Lockheed Martin became operational in September 2017 and is now entering the final testing stage.
As we learned, it’s becoming increasingly critical for ExxonMobil to better leverage the huge amount of data being collected to improve analytics, identify and monetise opportunities, develop a consistent approach across time frames, and implement a common computing and visualisation platform across its global fleet of assets.
Duke Energy’s “Road Ahead” to the Digitally Enabled Smart Grid
Jason Handley, Director, Smart Grid Emerging Technology and Operations at Duke Energy, gave the next ARC Industry Forum keynote address. Duke Energy has long been a leader in the utility industry. Today, it serves 7.5 million electric customers and 1.6 million natural gas customers in six states. Under the company’s “Road Ahead” program, it is investing $25 billion in energy grid modernisation and $11 billion in cleaner generation, and plans to expand its natural gas infrastructure to be able to almost double its current business mix from gas…all within ten years.
Mr Handley summarised some of the challenges Duke Energy faces:
• Customers want choice and control, regardless of market structure
• Increased penetration of distributed energy resources (DERs) will drive the need for grid edge intelligence
• IoT drives connectivity to all “things” (utility- and customer-owned)
• Flat-to-declining load growth in regulated service area due to DERs and energy efficiency improvements
• Shift to more distributed functions and advanced analytics, and
• Heightened need for cybersecurity and privacy.
He explained that the company will need to develop ways to deliver on customers’ wants and desires to create a “motivating customer experience”. To this end, customer-centric initiatives include things like implementing mechanisms to support flexible bill due dates, pre-pay programs, alerts, digital engagement, recognising customer milestones, and individualised offers.
Modernising the Power Grid
According to Mr Handley, the utility industry is moving from a period of steady linear progression to one of “hairball” complexity. Since variable generation resources (solar, wind, etc), don’t work well on today’s grid, smart grids will be needed. Decision making will have to be both centralised and distributed, with more distributed intelligence and control, he explained. Tomorrow’s grid will be a conglomeration of multiple generation sources from Duke Energy and others engaging in millions of energy transactions per second in a new peer-to-peer energy economy.
Digital Platforms, a New Approach to Software
In his keynote address at this year’s ARC Industry Forum, Andy Chatha, ARC Advisory Group’s Founder & CEO focused on the new open and secure hardware and software platforms that will play an increasingly important enabling role within a successful digital enterprise.
“As software companies are moving their applications to the cloud, they are moving to a new architecture that we call ‘digital platforms,’ on top of which you can configure or develop small apps or microservices, small, loosely coupled applications that do one thing well,” Andy explained.
Most enterprises today are already using major applications or platforms such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain management (SCM), customer relationship management (CRM), manufacturing execution systems (MES), and automation. But, as Andy explained, as companies, municipalities, and transportation networks become digital enterprises, they will need a few more digital platforms, including platforms to support the Internet of Things (IoT).
IoT Field Device or Edge Platform
Many companies today have platforms for connecting devices and some have thousands of measurement and control devices. Many of these are connected to the control or automation system, but a majority of them are for monitoring purposes. You may want to connect these to a separate IoT device platform, because connecting a monitoring device to a control system can be expensive. This platform can sit in your plant alongside your automation system in a device such as an edge gateway. “Moving forward, we expect that most major automation companies and machine builders will offer a device-level edge platform,” he said.
This platform gathers all data from the monitoring devices, performs some analytics, and then sends the data to the cloud for further analysis.
Cloud Computing Platforms
Andy moved on to his discussion of cloud computing platforms, also referred to as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). The main cloud compute or infrastructure platforms are shown here. These provide the basic computing and storage capabilities. And you build your apps on top of these. Among those shown, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are the most common today.
Analytics, AI, Machine Learning Platforms
“Once you move all the data to the cloud, you want to analyse it, so you will need an analytics and machine learning engine,” explained Andy. There are several hundred potential suppliers in this space, but only nine major ones. Some of these companies are investing billions of dollars to continue to enhance their AI engines. It can take significant effort and time to train these engines for specific applications.
Cloud Application Platforms
Several companies have also made significant investments to develop IoT development and runtime platforms that are suitable for demanding industrial applications. “Some cloud application solutions have built-in IoT solutions such as analytics and asset performance management (APM). A few companies have invested heavily to make it easier for their customers and partners to develop their own applications on top of their platforms,” said Andy. “Most major automation and equipment companies will develop their own cloud platforms. These platforms must be open and able to work together. The good news is that the platform suppliers will continuously enhance and keep their platforms up to date over time.”
Andy explained that there are two types of application platforms. The first is the development and runtime platform on top of which you can run IoT apps or solutions. These platforms connect to the field devices and gather the data for other solutions to use. The second type is IoT platforms such as Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Executive Panel Discussion
Following these three keynote addresses, Andy invited senior executives from ABB, AspenTech, and Schneider Electric to say a few words about how their respective companies are addressing these key issues before participating in a panel discussion with the keynote presenters. The panelists then addressed some pointed questions from both Andy and the audience, including their thoughts on the OPA initiative. This was followed by three full days of topical sessions and networking opportunities. For ARC Advisory Group clients who were not able to make it to this year’s Industry Forum in Orlando, we’d like to remind you that our upcoming Industry Forums in Barcelona, Spain (May 15-16); Bangalore, India (July 5-6); and Tokyo, Japan (July 10), will all have the same theme and feature similar content.
Captions:
Pix1: Open Process Automation development and field trials
Pix2: Source: ExxonMobil Presentation and Open Process Automation Forum Business Guide: Value Proposition and Business Case.
Pix3: Utility industry moving from linear progressions to “Hairball” complexity.
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