Project Solicitation

The project started when MxD and its members proposed addressing the challenges of “plug and play” connectivity and interoperability between different vendors. According to Rene Reinbigler, an enterprise architect at Merck, at a BioPhorum workshop, “communication between equipment from different suppliers will no longer be a nice to have, it will become mandatory in the industry.” MxD was searching for a computing architecture that allows swapping of different technologies with minimal levels of reconfiguration required and relying heavily on the use of standards, the Open Process Automation Standard (O-PAS), developed by the Open Process Automation Forum, a member of the Open Group, was of most interest to the project.

The project involved the development and implementation of a framework for gathering and analyzing all the data from a process manufacturing line necessary to improve visibility and control. This framework is a key first step in being able to implement proof-of-concepts for ‘mobile worker’, cybersecurity, predictive maintenance, and other digital twin use cases. This well-defined vision has the factory connected to: on-premise computing at the edge; cloud computing; and, the enterprise. This project looked to demonstrate key enabling technologies to achieve that digital manufacturing vision.

ADI believed the project scope was a great fit for the ADEPT software platform and believed the development of a demonstrator industrial computing rig, for this project called an Integration Test Environment (ITE) rig, would allow the concepts to be rapidly developed and clearly demonstrated.

Project Team

ADI’s partnership with the Barton Research Group in open automation connectivity and Digital Twin technology is part of how ADI became aware of the MxD project opportunity. The scope of this project made it a natural fit for the Barton Group to partner with ADI for the purposes of rapid prototyping and demonstrating their best-in-industry Digital Twin architecture and technology platform.

The Dow Chemical Company joined the team as the project’s “Pilot Manufacturer” and voice of the customer, and provided a key input to the project with the Dow Statement-of-Work (SOW) document. The Dow SOW document provides a detailed “customer discovery” report including solution objectives, key use cases, target demographic, solution architecture, ranked must-haves, and ranked nice-to-haves.

Solution Overview

The project team designed, implemented, and delivered an industrial open automation framework, based on ADI’s ADEPT software platform, that included multiple digital twin and open automation apps, running in real-time, on the purpose-designed and built ITE rig. Figure 1 illustrates a logical and functional view of the Digital Twin and Open Automation Framework. ADI’s systems engineering team performed an agile design engagement with the Dow/MxD team, designed, and built the ITE as an industrial-packaged computing rig based on Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) industrial computing equipment including Dell® edge server, NVIDIA® machine learning server, Cisco® industrial network gear, Eaton® smart power distribution equipment, and Texas Instruments® industrial communication prototyping equipment.

One of the unique features of the ADEPT software platform is its support for standards-based models. A model built using any one of dozens of commercial modeling tools, such as Matlab/Simulink and Siemens Flomaster, can be dragged into ADEPT, assigned to an app and an edge server, connected to factory data and other apps, and deployed to the computing framework with relative ease. This allowed the Barton Group team to design and prototype their Digital Twin apps using their preferred modeling tools and enabled fast iteration between the ADI modeling and integration team and the Barton Group algorithm development team.

Apps and Models

A key goal of this project was to demonstrate Digital Twin (DT) and Open Process Automation (OPA) applications, or apps, running in real-time within the ADEPT plug-and-play testbed framework. The project did not support connecting the testbed framework to a real factory, at least for this initial project scope, due to schedule and budget constraints. In order to rapidly develop and validate the DT and OPA apps, a portion of a process manufacturing line was simulated and hosted within an ADEPT plug-and-play computing framework to enable the simulated plant to be connected to, and virtually operated alongside, the DT and OPA apps. The table below summarizes the apps and simulations demonstrated within the testbed normal operation.

Industrial Plug-and-Play Connectivity Interfaces

The early project requirements discovery efforts included defining the industrial data connectivity needs required to support Dow’s modern and legacy process manufacturing lines. The table below summarizes the industrial plug-and-play connectivitydemonstrated on the testbed as well as those not demonstrated but natively supported on the testbed.