Introduction

Interoperability is often considered a trivial matter to link heterogeneous information processing applications.

In this regard, system integrators are granted full responsibility to address an alleged purely technical issue, not bothering business owners of those systems with geek matters.

 

The emergence of interoperability standards is bringing some respectability in this area. Leveraging graphical and syntactic standards like UML or XML, business owner are given the opportunity to know what their information processing systems are talking about.

 

Yet the reason to take interoperability seriously is not only a good documentation practice. Section 1 elaborates on the role of information technology to support complex systems interactions as a key enabler of organic intelligence and viability.

 

Beyond the basic meaning of enabling collaboration between software applications, interoperability involves several information related theories and concepts from understanding to symbols, from systems modelling to data structures, from semantics to syntax. Section 2 explores the fascinating world of linguistics and comunications trying to justify why we confusingly think that interoperability needs to be addressed in a scientific way.  

 

Among the many interoperability standard, this book focuses on the IEC61512/ISO62264  (aka ISA-88 / ISA-95). These standards take a different approach to address practical situations respectively the flexible control of manufacturing facilities and the exchange of information between "control systems" and "business systems", expanding to the whole MES (Manufacturing Execution Systems) buzz. Section 3 presents the content of these standards in a concise way to offer the reader an executive understanding of these quite famous standards. 

 

Surprisingly, looking at these 2 standards as one set of specifications for addressing the whole industrial operations domain was never consistently studied. The very same individuals have originated both standards that still share many participants in the respective development groups. Nevertheless, the mindset in both committees is radically different as their alleged scope. The technical report ISA-TR88.95.01 does not help much by writing down an analytical review of the different terms in both standards.

Interestingly, the common roots of these standards let consistent genetic fingerprint that can be easily deciphered by exposing abstract underlying concepts. Section 4 reveals these patterns at the different levels of abstraction, paving the way to a dramatic reduction of the abundant literature of almost thousands pages, finally exposing a consistent, elegant and extensible meta-model. 

 

These widely known standards are not the only available specifications that can be used for modelling industrial operations. Actually, this is no the explicit purpose of these standards that focuses on practical issues of designing automation and specifying data exchange in a rather specific context. Other standards are more dedicated to this purpose and offer readily available material. The fact that this book leverages the IEC61512/ISO62264 standards does not imply any judgement of the best choice for industrial operations interoperability. Section 5 gets through some of the other existing standards that can be considered as well trying to match some of their design patterns to the subjected standards. 

 

Finally, section 6 discusses the applicability to practical applications for data exchange, knowledge management, enterprise architecture, master data management to consolidate the understanding and relevance of such scientific support to enterprise complex socio-technical organisms.

 

This book does not contains the actual material for implementing the proposed models, which is publicly available on the Control Chain Management web site http://www.controlchainmanagement.org