For many years now, process manufacturing companies have wrestled with a persistent problem characterized as ‘operations silos’ or ‘islands of automation’. It is a condition where various parts of a plant are automated enough to do their specific jobs well on a local basis, but there is little communication or shared data between those parts.
The traditional solution calls for manual mapping between the two systems using industrial communication protocols to integrate data exchange and operations. Since there can be hundreds of tags involved, the solution can require extensive custom code writing that is unique to the specific skid. So, is there a better way, in this age of system convergence and connected manufacturing?
Fortunately, a new solution has emerged that makes these integrations far easier and quicker: the Module Type Package (MTP) implementation from NAMUR. For the rest of this white paper, we will explain what this is, and what it can do for manufacturers.