Yokogawa to work with ExxonMobil on OPA testbed

Yokogawa Electric Corporation has announced that it has been selected by ExxonMobil to be the Open Process Automation (OPA) system integrator responsible for establishing the company’s OPA testbed. Development work and experiments conducted on the testbed will support ExxonMobil’s effort to move towards a standards-based, open, secure and interoperable process control architecture.

According to Yokogawa, ExxonMobil will use the testbed to evaluate candidate components and standards and provide the basis for moving OPA technology into initial industrial field trials. Yokogawa’s development office for the testbed will be located near ExxonMobil’s Houston campus, and the initial stage is planned to be operational in Q4 of 2019.

ExxonMobil and Yokogawa are members of The Open Group Open Process Automation Forum (OPAF), an international forum of end users, system integrators, suppliers, academics and standards organisations who are working together to develop the specifications for using OPA technology in next-generation process control systems. An OPA-based control system is designed to support integration of best-in-class components and provide both configuration and application portability across components from different suppliers.

The ExxonMobil OPA testbed will leverage the existing OPA development work and technological expertise of Yokogawa’s US Technology Center. To facilitate the objectives of this collaborative project, Yokogawa will open an office in Houston. ExxonMobil intends to share the results of systems tests with its collaboration partners and OPAF. ExxonMobil will also encourage its collaboration partners to use the testbed to evaluate additional components that will be used in their independent field trials.

“We are looking forward to working with Yokogawa to stand up and operate the testbed for ExxonMobil and our collaboration partners,” said Brad Houk, Project Manager for ExxonMobil Research and Engineering Company. “This is an important milestone in the use of OPAF’s standards to create an industrial control system. ExxonMobil’s key criteria for system integrator selection included a demonstrated understanding of the technical requirements to create an OPA system from heterogeneous components and the ability to function as an agnostic broker of components from all suppliers.”

“Yokogawa is proactively participating in open architecture initiatives such as Open Process Automation with industry players globally,” said Tsuyoshi Abe, Yokogawa Senior Vice President and head of the company’s marketing headquarters. “We are honoured to be selected for this key project and are looking forward to working with ExxonMobil, its collaboration partners and the industry at the testbed facility to accelerate creation of an OPA ecosystem.”

Image credit: ©stock.adobe.com/au/freshidea