Representative End User Clients
Representative Automation Clients
Representative Software Clients
Utthunga participated as a Silver Sponsor at ARC Advisory Group’s 21st India Forum titled Driving Sustainability, Energy Transition, and Performance through Digitalization on July 12th and 13th, 2023. The 300+ delegates at the Forum networked, shared best practices, and got an overall view of market trends and requirements. In the Forum session on Advances in Automation: Architectures, Networks, Standards, three inter-linked presentations were made on “Achieving RRR (Reliant, Robust, Resilient) through Interoperable Standards & Architectures.” Divyang Shah, Group Lead, Reliance Industries Ltd. gave the end user perspective, and Dinesh Thukaram, Senior Vice President Industrial Solutions, Utthunga, spoke about the evolving architectures and opportunities. Praveen Kumar Singh, Chief OPC Solutions Architect, Utthunga, highlighted the standards that drive the technologies and architecture. This blog captures the key points of the three presentations.
Presentations by the Utthunga team can be watched here.
End User Perspective
Providing the all-important end user perspective, Divyang from Reliance Industries said that businesses are under pressure to increase profitability by decreasing operational cost and increasing competitiveness. In the current plant setup the three main challenges pertain to:
Operations cost and competitiveness: Digital transformation requires seamless integration between IT and OT. Plant level view is available, but enterprise level views are still a challenge. Cost of upgrade is high.
Closed approach of existing systems: Proprietary protocols are used; hence data is not readily accessible. Operational costs are high, and it is costly to integrate new capabilities. During upgrades IP protection and competency building are required.
Cybersecurity: Cybersecurity is not designed into the architecture, the tools are bolted on as multivendor systems are used, and there is no common monitoring platform.
Evolving Architectures and Opportunities
The baton was passed on to Dinesh from Utthunga who expressed that we’ve reached an inflection point and we have to “bite the bullet.” There’s been a lot of marketing hype surrounding digital transformation, and customers are told that it will double the top line and accelerate business growth. To a large extent this is a valid statement. But when we get down to the brass tacks it is more about how to get the data to all the layers of automation and about data transparency and availability. In this context, Dinesh spoke about Industry 4.0 technologies that have flattened the ISA 95 architecture. Previously, the architecture was visualized as a pyramid, now it is circular and the data can move from the sensor to the IoT platform without going through the controllers. New generation systems come with IoT enabled technologies with good connectivity that enable data collection from different sources, including legacy systems.
Next, the data is taken to the application level and deployed according to the requirement. For example, in the oil and gas upstream sector it has to be transported across remote sites or wireless networks. There are technologies that have matured to transport this data and handle any inconsistencies or lapses in the communication channels. In case of communication gaps/breakages, the data can be stored and then transmitted when the networks resume operation. These technologies ensure that the right data is available at the right time to the right people. IP can be protected by deploying applications on containers - older applications can be kept and newer ones can be applied; this provides flexibility to incrementally scale the system. Technologies like OPC provide data-driven insights and when these are hosted on the Cloud it can be scaled and future expansions can be planned. More than the technologies, customers are looking for reliability, robustness and resilient applications.
Technologies to solve end user challenges are making digital transformation a reality. “But these technologies have to be backed by standards,” added Dinesh before inviting Praveen to talk about standards.
Standards-driven Heterogenous Systems and Architecture
Praveen said that we all understand what digital transformation is and the value it brings to any organization. The question is: how do we implement it and solve end user challenges?
Challenge: Data is locked in different layers and because there are too many protocols there is a high run time and maintenance cost.
Solution: Help the customer unlock the data by integrating the IT and OT networks. Deploy OPC UA at the lowest possible level and let it come all the way up, which means there will be only one protocol and the firewall is secure. Then move to OPC DataBridge that converts TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) to OPC-UA PubSub, which provides ready to use connectivity as it is supported by all the cloud players.
Challenge: How do we ensure data security?
Solution: With the help of VPN there is network level security; on top of it there is the OPC UA standard security and data that was blocked in the devices can be moved to the cloud. The OPC UA frees up data from all the layers and you can get an enterprise view. Most of the products will start supporting OPC UA and the data will come together, enabling information modelling.