Information models and information exchange in plant-wide monitoring and control of industrial processes

The efficiency of industrial processes depends on how well the processes can be controlled and this affects the quality, use of resources as well as the environmental impact. Advanced monitoring and control solutions for large-scale industrial processes require information from different systems. The challenge in integration is diverse messaging structures and lack of common semantics in exchange of information between related information systems as well as their human operators. This paper provides a comparison of some of the existing standards of the domain defining suitable structures. Based on these, a model for data and event message structures is developed. The approach builds on a separation of concerns keeping the messaging semantics independent of the transport layer. The requirement is to enable also asynchronous communication as adapters are often needed in distributed environments with heterogeneous systems and communication protocols. The developed structures have been found suitable for communicating measurements and events in industrial process settings as shown by case examples.