Ansi/ISA-95 - Ninety Five

About ANSI/ISA-95

ANSI/ISA-95 (IEC 62264)

Founded in 1945, The International Society of Automation (ISA) is a leading, global, nonprofit organization that is setting the standard for automation by helping over 30,000 worldwide members and other professionals solve difficult technical problems, while enhancing their leadership and personal career capabilities. Based in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, ISA develops standards; certifies industry professionals; provides education and training; publishes books and technical articles; and hosts the largest conference and exhibition for automation professionals in the Western Hemisphere. ISA is the founding sponsor of The Automation Federation (www.automationfederation.org).

ISA also has a section in The Netherlands and Belgium.

In 1995 ISA (www.isa.org) started to address the required pieces of the integration puzzle to integrate enterprise business applications (ERP systems) with manufacturing management applications (known as MES or better to our opinion called MOM) by making a standard called ISA-95. In particular the ISA-95 standard has adopted:

1. Functional and physical model of an application hierarchy.

2. Terminology for manufacturing operations management.

3. Methodologies describing information exchanges within Level 3 (MOM) and between Levels 3 and 4 (Business Planning & Logistics).

4. A common data object model within Level 3.

5. An activity model for manufacturing operations management within Level 3.

Interesting to know is that the foundation for the development of the ISA-95 standardized data schema and functional work flow models is the Purdue Reference Model for Computer Integrated Manufacturing. This model came out of a 15-year process that was conducted by Dr. Ted Williams of Purdue University in 1988.

The ISA-95 standard consists of five parts. It goes beyond the scope of this website to describe the standard in detail, but ISA members can download the standard for free. For more information on membership you can contact Marc Blekkink, Managing Director of Ninety-Five, as he is the President of ISA Belgium Section.

Physical hierarchy

Easy95 provides a model for the physical (equipment and work resource) hierarchy to structure the functional domain levels into an application hierarchy within an enterprise. This model is described in part 1 and 2 of the ISA-95 standard.

physical hierarchy

Resource Schemas

Part 1 and 2 of the ISA-95 standard also define the object models. The basis for all models are the resource schema. We have four resource schemas:

Personnel
Material
Equipment
Process Segments

The resource object models construct a "segment" or unit of work, which is the ISA-95 generic term for an operation, step or phase.

MOM Information Category Schemas

The resource schema are used to construct the four MOM Information Category Schemas as described in part 1 and 2 of the standard. The four schemas are:

Product Definition
Capability
Schedule
Production Performance

The figure below shows an example of the Production Schedule Information of ISA-95. Easy95 implements all modules exactly as described in the standard.

production schedule

MOM Activity Models

Part 3 of the ISA-95 standard defines the detailed activities of several MOM applications and their interrelations (work flow) within Level 3 and as well interactions with Level 4 applications.

The standard provides generic detailed activity models that can be used to elaborate four key MOM activities:

Production
Maintenance
Quality Testing
Inventory Handling

The figure below gives an example of the generic detailed activity model.

Because Easy95 is a Framework, the user defines the activities he needs to improve and uses the guidelines of part 3 to define the applications. The most important step in a successful application is to be able to understand the exact work flow and data needs. Ninety-Five can help the end-user to execute this task in a structured approach.

Part 4 of the standard is still under development by ISA. The purpose of this part is to define additional object models and attributes to describe and organize the information exchanged between MOM functions described in part 3. In an asy95 project this is part of the interface definition. Ninety-Five will use as much as possible of existing data sources when building applications with Easy95 to allow for smooth integration with the existing infrasructure.

Business-to-manufacturing (B2M) Transactions

Part 5 defines B2M transactions models and messaging structures formed from a subset of OAGIS verbs and ISA-95 nouns composed of the objects defined in parts 1 and 2 of ISA-95.

OAGIS stands for Open Applications Group Integration Specification and is s standard developed by the Open Applications Group.

Easy95 uses the Business-to-Manufacturing Markup Language (B2MML) for integration. This standard includes OAGIS content and is an XML implementation of ISA-95. B2MML is developed and published by the WBF organization (the Forum for Automation and Manufacturing Professionals, formerly the World Batch Forum).

OPC

For communication with the process control and manufacturing automation applications layer the OPC standard can be used with Easy95.

OPC stands for OLE for Process Control and is a series of standards specifications. The first standard (before known as OPC) is now called the Data Access Specification (OPC-DA).

OPC-DA is primarily based on Microsoft's OLE COM (component object model) and DCOM (distributed component object model) technologies. It provides an abstraction layer or hide heterogeneous device protocols.

Please visit www.isa-95.com for more information on the standard.

A new Belgian website on ISA-95 is actived by Agoria. Ninety-Five is one of the Foundation partners of this initiative. Please take a look at www.isa95.be.