Intelligent Utility -March/April 2009 - (Page 30)
interoperability Smart manufacturing ©© VISION STRATEGY REALITY interoPeraBility lessons From manuFaCturing’s turn by steve ray thE sMart grid/intElligEnt utility concEPt is Documents (BODs) to exchange information about commercial orders, requests for bids, inventory levels, capacities and more. These BODs are in use by automakers, retailers, governments and service providers in over 40 countries. As new kinds of communication needs are being identified in the smart grid/intelligent utility, it makes sense to review the catalog of messages from OAGi to see which ones can be used out of the box and which might be adapted to the unique needs of the smart grid/intelligent utility. oMg’s bPMn IntellIgent UtIlIt y /// March/aprIl 2009 exploding onto the scene, accompanied by promises of increased efficiency, cost savings, load-leveling through demand response schemes, and postponing the need to build additional power plants. As the utility industry begins to tackle the details on how all of this will work, we have the opportunity to leverage years of hard work and experience Key lessons from other sectors—most notably the manuHaving poor facturing sector. interoperability is Smart manufacturing technology has expensive. studies at the been developing and improving for decades. national institute of standards Principles like lean manufacturing, paperless and technology (nist), such as design, ISO 9000 performance practices and “Economic impact of inadequate Taguchi methods are a given for today’s major infrastructure for supply chain integration” (2004), show wasted manufacturers. With trends moving toward expenses in the billions of dollars global manufacturing and outsourcing, prac- directly attributable to data tices have now evolved into Internet-based exchange errors. communication of engineering designs, invenAchieving interoperability tory levels, purchase orders, and a wide variety is not easy. a nist report, of other logistical, financial and technical data. “concepts for automating Supporting all of this is a suite of standards that systems integration” (2003), has been developed, deployed, and winnowed identifies 23 different dimensions down to some that really help—leaving others of interoperability problems, only one of which is syntactic conflict, that seemed promising but failed to meet which is what most people think expectations by the wayside. of when integrating systems. So, what can we learn from all those years Large, universal solutions of development, deployment, and trial and tend to be difficult to error? There are a few concepts that the utility implement. choose solutions industry can take advantage of to save years of that you can adopt in bite-sized chunks. expensive experimentation. Since the smart grid/intelligent utility is Take advantage of inherently a distributed system, we can imme- solutions that are already diately start adopting some of the Internet-based in use in the e-commerce/ e-business sector. standards in use by manufacturers. E-businEss standards Assume the world will always be heterogeneous. integration is a process, not an end state, so pay attention to the process. The Object Management Group (OMG) has developed a language called Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) to describe the flow of business processes and information in a neutral, open way. This enables business partners using a variety of commercial project management tools to integrate their respective procedures. inforMation ExchangE Protocols Another possibility is building information exchange protocols on top of the established communications layer. This can be accomplished by using middleware standards including Web Services from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and ebXML from United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT) and Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS). These international standards are supported by a wide selection of commercial tools that make the goal of seamlessly communicating with your business partners both more achievable and affordable. iMPlEMEnt incrEMEntally 30 The Open Application Group, Inc. (OAGi) is an open industry consortium that has defined a comprehensive set of Business Object An expensive lesson that cannot be overemphasized is to avoid the temptation to design a comprehensive, universal solution from soup to nuts. Instead, adopt a consistent overarching framework and philosophy for your future integration needs. But don’t try to anticipate all of the details upfront. Define the skeleton and put the flesh on the bones as needed. An example from the manufacturing world where a complete solution was attempted upfront was the Manufacturing Automation Protocol (MAP) advocated by General Motors in the 1980s. While some pieces of MAP eventually made their way into
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