CPLANE.ai, ExxonMobil announce joint initiative for industrial orchestration

June 15, 2020

CPLANE.ai announced that it has engaged with ExxonMobil in an effort to accelerate the development of digital infrastructure orchestration for industrial automation systems. Increasing global competition and cybersecurity risks are driving process industries to create Open Process Automation (OPA) Systems with best-in-class components, simplified management and improved cybersecurity. Digital infrastructure orchestration is a critical component of these new, open systems.

“CPLANE.ai’s technology will help ExxonMobil advance our R&D initiative to define a standards-based, open, secure, interoperable process automation architecture. Through this collaboration, we will gain important data and knowledge on how digital infrastructure can be securely and reliably managed in a multi-vendor, process control system," says Don Bartusiak, chief engineer for process control at ExxonMobil Research and Engineering.   

Digital infrastructure orchestration automates the provisioning, monitoring, failure-recovery and evolution of OPA systems while maintaining continuous operations and network-based cybersecurity. Steve Bitar, an automation leader at ExxonMobil Research and Engineering, says “moving forward, automation from digital infrastructure orchestration will allow us to integrate new technologies much more quickly and at much greater scale.”  

To advance the understanding of digital infrastructure orchestration, CPLANE.ai has created a Digital Infrastructure Test Bed for the development, rapid iteration and testing of orchestration concepts for OPA systems.  To facilitate this rapid learning process, this activity will leverage ExxonMobil’s insights from internal demonstration OPA systems and CPLANE.ai’s proven orchestration platform that is being extended to meet the unique needs of industrial customers. The benefits of this project will extend to process industries worldwide by contributing to open standards being developed by the Open Group’s Open Process Automation Forum (OPAF).