Open Process Automation

The Case for Breaking Down Barriers and Enabling New Possibilities

The hum of the plant was a mix of musty determination and despair, its units pumping out products using systems that had seen better decades. In the cluttered control room, a single station failure turned this routine operation into a systems upgrade project that had become a frightening and costly nightmare – an urgent system modernization project. Without a budget or sufficient resources, the update would have a significant impact on the plant’s profitability, —months behind schedule and draining resources. A project meant to modernize the facility had spiraled into a logistical nightmare. The plant was trapped, shackled to a legacy architecture designed for another era.

"Today's automation systems are expensive to update and expand, difficult to integrate with new technologies, and often limited to a single supplier. Open Process Automation (OPA) is the technology platform solution that changes that."

"Today's automation systems are expensive to update, challenging to expand, and hard to integrate with new technologies, often locking users into a single supplier. Open Process Automation (OPA) offers a transformative platform to overcome these limitations."
- Mark Hammer

What Exactly is Open Process Automation (OPA)?

An OPA system is a software-defined control system that combines the benefits of traditional DCS systems with greater flexibility. Unlike single-vendor-locked systems, OPA allows you to design, operate, and expand your plants using interoperable software and hardware from multiple vendors. Applications and workloads are containerized, running seamlessly with an Open Process Communication Framework (OCF). OCF simplifies data integration from various sources, giving engineers to select best-of-breed applications and seamlessly integrate new technologies a clearer view and enabling faster decision-making.

The Open Process Automation Forum (OPAF) envisions a transformative process control architecture that is standards-based, open, secure, and interoperable. Its goals include:

Providing access to leading-edge capabilities
Enabling integration of best-in-class components
Preserving application software for asset owners while reducing replacement costs
Promoting innovation and driving value creation across industries
Supporting diverse industries with a flexible, scalable approach
Offering commercially available solutions from multiple suppliers
Fostering inclusive collaboration between users and suppliers
Establishing a framework for open systems architecture

Since 2017, Yokogawa has developed OPA standards. In 2019, it partnered with ExxonMobil and others to bring OPA from lab to field, culminating in the first OPA system running a chemical facility.

With decades of integration process controls experience, Yokogawa combines its OPA core software, OPA system enabling tools, and its system integration processes technologies to deliver results. OPA allows the use of components from multiple suppliers, offering clients best-in-class solutions.

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1. What is Open Process Automation (OPA)?

Rather than proprietary Distributed Control Systems (DCS) and Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) of today's factory automation strategies, open process automation is a new generation of process control that's open, secure, and interoperable. In short, OPA is a software-defined automation system, not tied to a specific hardware platform.

2. Who is behind OPA?

The Open Process Automation Forum was created in 2017 by End Users, under the Open Group to create the Open Process Automation Standard (OPA-S). It is a group of over 100 companies that have come together to create a standard of standards aimed at the next generation of controls focused on lowering Capital and Operational Costs.

3. What is the status of O-PAS standard?

The second version, 2.1, of O-PAS (The Open Group Open Process Automation Standard) has come out to help the chemical industry harness new digital tools such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, cloud computing, data analytics, and edge computing while working within system constraints such as:

keeping human/machine interfaces and operational procedures usable by current and new workers
aggressively implementing digital security
never compromising operational safety

The technical components of the O-PAS Standard are as follows:

Technical Architecture
Security Aspects
Profiles
Connectivity Framework
System Management
Configuration Portability
Physical Platform
Application Portability

Version 3.X is under development and is focused on the system management and physical platform standards. Version 2.1 focuses on the connectivity framework and Security.