The OPC Foundation has been developing several companion specifications to the OPC UA. One of these is OPC UA For ISA95, which is reaching the Release Candidate phase already.

Specification targets

The specification will define how manufacturing related information can be delivered between MES (Manufacturing Execution Systems) and ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) applications, based on concepts defined in the ISA95 specification.

At the first phase, the specification will concentrate on the communication between ISA 95 Level 3 (Manufacturing Operations and Control) and Level 4 (Business Planning and Logistics) applications as defined in ISA-95.01 and ISA-95.02 parts of the specification. This includes definitions for data related to

• Personnel
• Equipment
• Physical Assets
• Material (and Energy)
• Process Segments

Presentation

The specification work has been done in the OPC Foundation ISA95 Working Group, lead by Paul Hunkar. Paul gave the first presentation about the subject at the OPC and MES Day, in Finland, on October 9th, 2012. The event included several presentations related to ISA95 and MES. You can download all the key notes of the event from the OPC archives of the Finnish Society of Automation.

Demo

The ISA95 information model has already been incorporated in the Easy95 product by Ninety-Five, a Belgian company specialized in ISA95-based implementations. And what’s most interesting is that, they used Prosys OPC UA Java SDK to add the OPC UA server in their existing product.

You can watch the following video, which demonstrates the capabilities in five minutes: