ISA and OAGi come to an understanding

ControlGlobal.com
03/06/2007

ISA and OAGi have entered into an agreement to cooperate on joint projects and exchange standards documentation. The first step taken under this cooperative agreement includes OAGi’s commitment to express the ISA-95 data models in the OAGIS standard as both UML data models and OAGIS XML schema definitions, and to recommend enhancements to the ISA-95 standard based on the content and experience of the OAGi constituency.

A year ago, ISA and OAGi announced their involvement in the Manufacturing Interoperability Guideline Working Group, a collaborative venture of ISA, MIMOSA, OAGi, OPC, and WBF. The group is supporting development of an industry guideline that defines generic business process models for data exchange between manufacturing operations management and business support systems.

“This memorandum arises out of the agreement to harmonize our standards as a critical step in accomplishing the goals of the Manufacturing Interoperability Guideline Working Group,” says ISA Director of Publishing Services Chip Lee.

The Open Applications Group is a not-for-profit open standards development organization building a standard called the Open Applications Group Integration Specification (OAGIS). The OAGIS standard covers data exchange requirements for business systems and applications, including manufacturing and operations management systems.

The ISA-95 standard for manufacturing planning and operations and the related ISA-SP95 committee have contributed significant data exchange content and models supporting manufacturing industry. Because ISA’s standard has been historically used in process manufacturing, and the OAGIS standard has typically been utilized in discrete manufacturing, an opportunity exists to further both standards through cooperation and refinement.

In order to be in compliance with the UN/CEFACT Core Components technology, and also to avoid data duplication and redundancy in the two standards, the ISA-95 and OAGIS data models may have to be modified from time to time. Through their staff and project teams, ISA and OAGi have agreed to collaborate and help reconcile any differences.

The two organizations have also agreed to share the official minutes of all working group meetings associated with the program, which will help to increase communication and keep all parties updated on the status of the projects.

The agreement does not preclude any coordination and cooperation by either organization with other groups.