Challenge
Many companies are investing in advanced analytical capabilities to remain competitive. But data about processes often exists in organisational silos, and a lack of interoperability across both data and analytical systems has caused extensive challenges in all sectors, including the energy sector. These challenges severely hamper the sector’s ability to gain from the insights achievable from advanced data analytics solutions.
Program 3: Open specification for analytics interoperability
This project aims to provide integrated analytical capabilities across a whole project or asset lifecycle, by formulating and demonstrating an open specification for interoperable analytics.
The Open Industrial Interoperability Ecosystem (OIIE) has been developing since 2009, combining a portfolio of existing industry standards to achieve system-of-systems data interoperability in energy, petrochemical and asset-intensive industries. This project will extend OIIE (published as part of ISO/TS 18101-1:2019) to standards-based interoperability for analytics, giving oversight of a company’s operations. Provision of interoperable analytics will allow sharing results between multiple data analysis methods that perform analysis in the same or different contexts for each component of a system. By sharing and aggregating the analyses produced, a holistic view for the entire system can be viewed, for better strategic analysis and decision making.
Several high-priority use cases for analytics interoperability are be identified in collaboration with industry partners. These use cases will be used to select an appropriate set of existing software practices and standards for analytics interoperability, as the basis for an open specification. Example use cases proposed for demonstrating the benefits of interoperable ecosystems for analytics within Australia’s energy export infrastructure include:
- real time optimisation
- early warning and fault detection
- integrating trading and operations
- operationalising insights from data science
- risk analysis across an asset’s entire life cycle.
The next step in each case is to develop and deploy a pilot implementation of the formulated open specification on an energy infrastructure asset, to demonstrate the capability that has been developed and promote uptake in the industry. The pilot implementation will leverage the existing reference implementations of the OIIE specifications provided by the Australian OIIE™ Interoperability Laboratory.
The primary benefit is for asset owners and operators to take advantage of higher-quality decision-making based on a more holistic view and analysis of their operations.
By developing and demonstrating these open specifications for analytics interoperability, the aim is to move analytical systems from ad-hoc bespoke implementations to a standards-based interoperable model. Industry will be able to adopt more holistic analytics on a supplier-neutral basis, avoiding vendor lock-in and accessing best-of-breed solutions with significantly reduced cost and risk.
Partners: The University of South Australia, Asset Institute, MIMOSA, Queensland University of Technology, QLD Government Department of State Development, Infrastructure, Local Government and Planning
Project Researchers: Professor Markus Stumptner, Professor John Boland, Dr Karamjit Kaur, Dr Georg Grossmann, Dr Wolfgang Mayer
Duration: 3 years