ISA executive board member Don Bartusiak, who has previously served as ExxonMobil’s chief engineer for process control, has become known as a significant champion of Open Process Automation. During a presentation at the 2017 ARC Forum in Orlando, Fla., he announced ExxonMobil’s next-generation multivendor automation architecture initiative and described how industry had had enough of closed, proprietary automation systems. The future, he said, was multivendor, interoperable, standards-based, open and secure. The future is here with the late June launch of the Coalition for Open Process Automation (COPA) QuickStart system, which is aligned with The Open Group O-PAS Standard, a “standards of standards” for industrial process automation developed by the Open Process Automation Forum (OPAF).
Bartusiak’s company, Collaborative Systems Integration, is the systems integrator for the COPA QuickStart offering. Bartusiak said, “Industrial manufacturers have repeatedly told me that if O-PAS Standard–aligned systems were available, they would buy them. The COPA QuickStart system is our answer to that challenge.” COPA is applying years of research, collaboration, and investment by members of OPAF to bring to market industrial control systems (ICSs) that are built on industry standards for open, secure, and interoperable architectures. The COPA partner companies have engineered COPA QuickStart to incorporate components and technologies from multiple vendors into a single, advanced and cohesive industrial control system.
It is said to provide the critical first step in helping industrial manufacturers start learning, proving, and adopting open architecture ICS solutions into their operations. “The move is analogous to the shifts that occurred when PC technology displaced minicomputers and mainframes,” said Automation.com’s Bill Lydon. “That extraordinarily successful trend accelerated efficiency and profitability for companies of all sizes.”
Find out more here or here. This article was originally published in InTech's July/August issue.
