Factories Benefit From Open, Flexible Architecture
Today's industrial manufacturing environment is very similar to the IBM legacy mainframe environments of the mid 1990s; though functional, they are costly to maintain, difficult to connect, and slow to evolve. Whether manufacturersÂ’ industrial automation and control systems are discrete, process, batch, or hybrid systems, they now understand that their systems need to interact in real-time with the other enterprise applications, supply chain partners, and end customers. To accomplish this, manufacturers are bringing their industrial automation systems online, and experiencing challenges in:
- Reliability. As manufacturing operations become globally integrated, manufacturers are challenged to provide consistent access to data while making the manufacturing environment programmable and flexible.
- Cost. Legacy industrial automation and control systems, although often fully depreciated in existing manufacturing environments, require significant investment to bring online.
- Product design integration. Data silos and closed systems hinder the ability to reduce time-to-market for new products.
- Data interaction. Incorporating real-time factory productivity and operational data into manufacturing execution systems (MES), customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management (SCM), and other enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems is an increasingly complex data translation exercise.
These challenges are pushing manufacturers to start using standard Ethernet and IP technologies throughout the manufacturing environment. By moving to standard technologies, manufacturers reap multiple benefits, including:
- Cost savings. Standard Ethernet and IP technology have greater market penetration and thusare more likely than proprietary technology to have shorter and more consistent cost-reduction life cycles.
- Improved maintenance. As access to skilled production staff becomes more difficult, legacy industrial automation and control technology is becoming more complex to maintain than standard Ethernet and IP networking technology.
- Enhanced flexibility. Standard Ethernet and IP technology allow for rapid production gains, new functionality, and capabilities that evolve withthe manufacturing environment, and beyond.
- Increased efficiency. Standard Ethernet and IP technology ease integration with business systems.
Integrating and Upgrading Industrial Automation
To support manufacturers, Cisco has developed its Ethernet-to-the-Factory (ETTF) architecture not only to provide standards-based network services to the applications, devices, and equipment found in modern industrial automation and control systems, but to integrate them into the wider enterprise network. The Cisco ETTF architecture provides design and implementation guidance so that manufacturers can take advantage of real-time communication requirements, as well as achieve the reliability and resiliency these systems require.
The Cisco ETTF solution is targeted to manufacturing customers seeking to integrate or upgrade their industrial automation and control networks to standard networking technologies so they can:
- Lower the TCO of their current industrial automation and control network approach
- Integrate the industrial automation and control systems with the wider enterprise
- Take advantage of the networking innovations provided by using standards-based technologies
Underlying the ETTF architecture is Cisco Service-Oriented Network Architecture (SONA). SONA encompasses three key architectural layers to support ETTF:
- The Network Infrastructure Layer covers network locations from which users may access devices on the factory floor
- The Interactive Services Layer integrates unified communications and security capabilities that enable ease of communication among dispersedfactories, while ensuring security of communications
- The Application Layer includes all software used by end users within the factory and software used for collaboration
Benefits of Collaboration
Bringing ETTF and SONA together helps provide the elements necessary for collaboration between plant managers and the IT department.
The Cisco ETTF and SONA architectures provide a basis from which the IT department,plant managers, and control engineers can work together. The combined capabilities of SONA and ETTF [link to http://www.cisco.com/web/strategy/manufacturing/ettf_overview.html] accelerate the convergence of standard networking technologies with the industrial automation and control environment, as well as the collaboration of IT and engineering executives. By adopting these architectures, manufacturers can operate at higher levels of performance, efficiency, and uptime compared to previous solutions.
