Open applications and consistency in enterprise integration standards is a crucial goal of the Manufacturing Interoperability Guideline Working Group, a collaborative effort between the Open Applications Group, Inc. (OAGi), WBF, ISA, MIMOSA, and OPC Foundation. In keeping with the group's mission to open communication between operations management and business layers in manufacturing, ISA and WBF have announced the availability of Version 4 (V04) of the business-to-manufacturing markup language (B2MML) schemas and documentation on the WBF XML Working Group's internal Web site.
Changes to the documentation will support ANSI/ISA-95 standards and build in consistency with the open applications group integration specification (OAGIS) documentation in areas such as transaction message headers, commands, and formats. Such changes will also reduce end-user and vendor costs for system integration.
B2MML is an XML implementation of the ANSI/ISA-95 family of standards known internationally as IEC/ISO 62264. The documents consist of a set of XML schemas that implement the data models in the ISA-95 standard. B2MML is meant to be a common data format to link enterprise resource planning and supply chain management systems with manufacturing systems such as control systems and manufacturing execution systems.
B2MML V04 is the end result of years of collaboration between the ISA-SP95 committee, OAG, and the WBF XML working group. "It provides an interface standard that combines the best of all three efforts," said Dennis Brandl, president of BR&L Consulting in Cary, N.C., and editor of the ISA-95.03 standard. "It extends the original widely used B2MML standard to include OAG-style transactions, and it includes the United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT) core component specifications." The UN/CEFACT core components are standards that ensure common agreement on "how to represent core data types, such as monetary units, date and time, and identification codes," Brandi said. "UN/CEFACT allows for better integration of standard schemas into corporate applications. OAGiS transactions allow for better integration of B2MML into corporate business processes, and B2MML V04 provides richer support for a broader class of industries."
The ISA-95 standard provides models and terminology to standardize the integration of enterprise systems and manufacturing control systems. B2MML provides an IT ready implementation of the ISA-95 standard and has become the defacto implementation vehicle for ISA-95 based projects.
The Open Applications Group, Inc. (OAGi) is a not-for-profit open standards group building process-based XML standards for business-to-business (B2B) and application-to-application (A2A) integration. "By incorporating OAGIS style transactions in the ISA-95 standard the ISA-SP95 committee took a major step in bringing two popular interoperability tool sets together," said Dave Emerson, WBF XML Working Group chairman.
"B2MML V04 will continue this trend with support for OAGIS transactions and UN/CEFACT core components," Emerson said. "Since OAGIS components can fit into standard B2MML extension methods, combined B2MML and OAGIS payloads can now be exchanged using OAGIS style transactions in B2MML. This will help manufacturers who utilize both B2MML and OAGIS in their enterprise level systems."
"Using the OAGIS transaction model will benefit end users by bringing together the two most widely adopted [people to business] integration standards, ISA-95/B2MML and OAGIS," said OPC Foundation President Tom Burke. "The OPC Foundation is interested in adding support for ISA-95 to the OPC Unified Architecture data model set; this release of B2MML will be a good starting point for this work," he said.
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Source: InTech
