The Evolution of Wonderware’s FactorySuiteâ

By Tim Sowell, Vice President, Product Management, IMAPS Software Division

Prologue
Wonderwareâ created the Windowsâ-based process visualization marketplace in 1989 when the
company introduced the first version of the InTouchâ human-machine interface (HMI) software
product. Over the next half decade, Wonderware expanded the breadth of its industrial automation
offerings with new toolsets for manufacturing execution systems (MES), batch management, a real-
time relational database for factory historization, and a PC-based control application engine.

The company recognized in 1996, however, that manufacturing facilities would need to integrate
the plant automation layer with enterprise business systems in order to bring their manufacturing
facilities under control and to satisfy the demanding supply chain requirements of global e-
commerce (which is still evolving today). To begin this integration, Wonderware introduced its first
FactorySuiteâ of products in 1997. This first version of the suite was built on core manufacturing
components that were developed internally or added via acquisitions. FactorySuite 1000
incorporated five core modules for process visualization, a real-time database, a real-time control
scripting engine, batch process management and discrete work-in-process tracking – all running on
top of Wonderware’s superb data acquisition foundation.

In 1999, the second generation FactorySuite 2000 family extended these products even further,
especially in terms of tighter component integration and use of common elements among those
components. Since that time, Wonderware has continued to evolve the individual functionality of
each component. But the company’s product direction team began to realize that this broad
industrial automation space is not black-and-white in nature, but is a “gray” area, made up of many
functions and many products that cross the many manufacturing “time zones” – ranging from the
millisecond requirements of the plant floor automation layer to the minute-, hour- or even day-
long requirements that drive enterprise business systems. The capabilities of FactorySuite
components were outstanding, but all too often the package seemed to be more than what most
user’s required.

From an end user point of view, FactorySuite appear fragmented in nature, with high costs of
integration and maintenance. In response to customer input, Wonderware’s product development
team commissioned the design of a new automation infrastructure that could enable products with
different but complementary functions to be built on the same framework. The fruit of their labors
is Wonderware’s new ArchestrAä framework. ArchestrA isn’t an off-the-shelf product; rather, it’s an
infrastructure that provides the primary functional services needed to build products for an
industrial automation application. It’s intended to abstract users from the complexities of the
underlying technologies so that they only need assembly skills, not sophisticated programming
skills, and can concentrate instead on satisfying domain requirements with which they’re already
familiar. By building these common application requirements into a framework, users need not be
concerned with their design or implementation when configuring any OEM product or end user
system. The entire framework resides on top of the foundation enabling technologies provided by
Microsoft with its operating system and associated enabling software.
As FactorySuite enters its next major evolutionary phase, ArchestrA is without a doubt its most
significant functional and architectural enhancement in the history of FactorySuite. Transformation
of the suite will take another two years to complete; however, as Wonderware adds new
components to extend the suite’s analysis capabilities and transform process data into real
information, delivering it anywhere, anytime. All this will be done by leveraging the new ArchestrA
framework as the backbone on which new components are built – by Wonderware and by other
vendors – to enter a new dimension of project engineering efficiency.

Wonderware’s new components will complement existing FactorySuite modules, enabling them to
be applied in new applications or to extend existing Installations. At the same time, they will enable
applications to evolve to a new, more efficient architecture that truly addresses the issues of total
cost of ownership and project life cycles, both of which are crucial in an ever-changing world of
industrial automation.

This paper will take the reader through this evolution, providing a common knowledge base for
existing and new customers on the value of and direction for the entire manufacturing information
and supervisory control space.

The Driving Forces Behind FactorySuite

It’s important to begin with an understanding of the positioning of FactorySuite and what keeps
driving its development direction. Manufacturing facilities typically deploy measurement and
control systems for controlling manufacturing equipment and business systems for planning and
financial functions. In the past, these two areas – usually normally referred to as supervisory control
and manufacturing information systems – have not been integrated. This will have to change in the
future.

In order for manufacturing companies to be competitive in today's world they must operate in
Internet time. Wonderware recognized in 1996 that companies would first concentrate on
developing their business applications, such as ERP systems, and only then would they turn their
attention to real-time automation systems on the plant floor. Very few companies realized at that
time that both of these investments would really only achieve their full potential when they came
together as one. Through it all, Wonderware has insisted that manufacturing applications needed to
be in control of manufacturing processes in order to achieve consistent production, with consistent
product quality, and to be able address the core supply chain requirements crucial for
competitiveness in the “Internet time” world.

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 This application space is served by a wide range
of systems:
The biggest Issues:
• HMI • DCS
• SCADA • PIMs/Historian
• Integration
• Batch • Advanced Control Business • Cost of Ownership due to
Systems . Maintenance Fragmentation
Systems
• MES • Simulation Systems
(Factory Financials,
ERP, etc…)

Supervisory Control and

Manufacturing
The Premier Supplier of
Software to the Solution
Information
Providers in this space.

Measurement and Control Systems

(Field Devices, PLCs, DCS controllers, etc…)

The supervisory control and manufacturing information space is served by a variety of systems,
including HMI, distributed control systems (DCS), supervisory control and data acquisition systems
(SCADA), process information management systems (PIM), MES, batch and recipe management
systems, and advanced control/simulation systems.

The proliferation of Microsoft technologies over the past decade, combined with the increasing
desire on part of the users to solve problems in consistent, integrated fashion, has meant the
architectures and functional capabilities of these disparate systems have been converging – with a
resulting overlap in functionality that is significant and continues to increase. The issue of dealing
with different “time zones” in this space – from millisecond events at the plant floor to seconds in
the supervisory layer to hours/ days/ years in business systems – makes it a “transformation” space.
Those companies that master time-oriented space will have the upper hand in both manufacturing
efficiency and delivery to the supply chain in the Internet world.

Wonderware recognized that its customers would evolve to requiring functionality that takes their
existing installations into this space. Wonderware is committed to being the leading supplier of
functionality and core infrastructure in this dynamic “gray” area, which has given rise to the
requirement for FactorySuite to provide a framework of core functional components for the
supervisory control and manufacturing information space.

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Introduction of FactorySuite
FactorySuite 1000 originally was delivered as a suite of core components that delivered:

· Process visualization (InTouchä)

· Real-time scripting engine (InControlä)
· Plant database (InSQLä)
· Batch processing (InBatchä)
· Discrete work-in-process tracking (InTrackä)

Each component was designed to use Wonderware's 1000 different I/O Servers for data acquisition,
enabling customers to extend their existing HMI applications into other parts of the manufacturing
information space and, in the process, gaining in-house domain expertise in these crucial aspects of
the industrial automation and manufacturing information space.

FactorySuite 2000 increased the integration between suite components and added new common
elements to provide a better integrated suite. As the growth of FactorySuite applications has grown
since then, the requirement has grown in parallel to transform the data in the powerful databases
of IndustrialSQL Server, InTrack and InBatch into valuable information that is available to anyone
who needs it.

Transforming Data into Information

A natural part of FactorySuite's evolution was the customer's requirement to have this process data
in a more useful form at minimal effort. To achieve this, Wonderware added new client analyst
components that include:

· Active Factory, which provides a powerful set of reporting tools for IndustrialSQL
Server, thus extending the standard desktop tools of Microsoft Office and enabling
users to transform data into information using standard off-the-shelf tools.

· QI Analyst, which provides the next step in the evolution of FactorySuite's quality
tools, enabling statistical analysis of data generated within InTouch, I/O servers or
IndustrialSQL Server history files. Presentations charts also can be provided for use
within InTouch or on standalone desktop clients.

· DT Analyst, which is key to manufacturing facilities staying competitive through the

effective use of their existing assets. In the past, many people have built IndustrialSQL
Server applications or Microsoft SQL Server to achieve some level of understanding of
plant asset utilization. DT Analyst is a new product that provides out-of-the box
functionality for monitoring plant assets and determining the key utilization parameters
for entire plants.

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A New Era of Productivity & Scalability
Even at the birth of FactorySuite 1000, the Wonderware Product Development Team recognized
that in order to really leverage the manufacturing environment, FactorySuite would have to move
beyond the grouping of core functional components to a new offering, one built on a common
framework of industrial or manufacturing services that are required for all applications, all while
maintaining the rich functionality of FactorySuite.

Fundamental to this evolution is the ability to satisfy the N tier architectures required to meet the
demands of delivering information everywhere – including large numbers of clients on the Internet
– in personalized form. Another basic requirement was that manufacturing automation and
information systems must be scalable, enabling installation of pilot systems to validate automation
strategies and then enabling the seamless integration of many “islands” into one full system.

In order to achieve this evolutionary offering, Wonderware commissioned a new framework called
“ArchestrA” on which Wonderware can build many products, all with a common foundation. This
approach will enable continued growth in FactorySuite functionality while providing an extendable,
scaleable and efficient architecture to support new components as well as the redesign of existing
components. These new reconfigured products will provide the facility for existing customers to
migrate their current systems as well as to extend their current functionality through seamless
integration to the new products. This not only assures a long growth path for existing applications
but it maintains Wonderware's commitment to its installed base that applications will be
upgradeable.

Given this need for a growth path, it’s important to understand the ArchestrA framework and what
possibilities it provides for the creation of new products. The design objectives of this new
framework were:

· To enable FactorySuite to be more responsive to market functional requirements

Today’s rapidly changing world requires automation and information systems to be
adaptive, permitting new functionality to be designed and delivered efficiently, with
minimal customer impact and low risk for existing applications. Wonderware's goal is to be
able to react quickly to the market changes, enabling FactorySuite customers to evolve
their manufacturing systems and remain competitive.

· To remove integration overhead across multiple automation solutions

One of the biggest issues in the MES space is that it incorporates many disciplines that have
been traditionally required, causing fragmentation and integration has been the limiting
factor. Through a new platform Wonderware is striving to provide a common framework
on which all the functional disciplines can be executed, providing seamless integration.

· To dramatically improve application efficiency among and within projects

Project productivity is a driving goal for engineering, to reduce risk and project-to-project
rework. If automation systems are going to provide a return on investment (ROI) over their
life cycles in highly competitive manufacturing markets, projects must be capable of being
developed installed quickly and at low risk, so the plant is seeing ROI as quickly as possible.
Then, as market forces change the manufacturing process, existing systems can be
efficiently updated and adjusted with minimal risk to existing production operations.

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· To harness the domain expertise of multiple user engineering centers without added
integration layers
Fundamental to a successful project implementation is deployment of the best domain
experience, since this domain functionality provides differentiation for the manufacturer.
The problem is that today, it’s rare to find a company with all the domain knowledge they
require. It’s very often necessary to use a number of engineering houses in order to build a
total system – but as soon as a company does this, then issues of integration, consistency
and maintainability come to the fore.

ArchestrA is targeted at enabling end users to harness the power of many domain
engineering houses without causing integration and maintainability issues. ArchestrA does
this by providing a single development environment in which engineers can capture their
particular domain functionality in self-contained identities. These identities can then run on
the same framework and can automatically be integrated into a common name space,
security system and series of services. In essence, the user only needs to assemble these
functionalities according to their system requirements.

· To address vital project life cycle issues of efficient development, functional

evolution and maintenance/ diagnostics
Too often the cost of a project is only considered at the time when the project is designed
and implemented. The real cost, however, relates to how long the project can continue to
provide a return on investment while continuing to enable the manufacturing facility to be
competitive. Built into this calculation is the cost of the “operational lifetime of a project,”
taking into account the ability to upgrade, to add new functionality, to maintain and to
diagnose the system. As part of Wonderware's commitment to supporting evolutionary
automation systems, ArchestrA has been designed specifically to address these
requirements.

· To provide scalability in functionality and scope without added reengineering cost

One of the key features required to extend a project’s life is the ability to absorb changes
in project functionality scope through its lifetime. This includes the ability to re-architect a
system to accommodate new functionality. ArchestrA addresses this need by abstracting
the application model from the deployment or topology aspects, so that changes in the
topology will have limited impact on application functionality.

· To address efficient e-commerce delivery of products and functionality

Basic to today's e-commerce world is the ability encapsulate functionality in order to
efficiently deliver it via the Internet. This download capability is critical to enabling global
engineering for application development in worldwide enterprises.

· To make globalization an advantage, not a liability

One of the biggest changes in the last 10 years is the globalization of businesses to serve
markets that are truly global. This has caused many manufacturing facilities to establish
multiple, similar automation/information development centers around the world that must
still integrate into one global business system. ArchestrA is designed to bring global
engineering houses together by abstracting human languages from application engineering.
By providing a powerful set of international services, not only can different engineering
center functionality work together within the same application, but now functionality
developed in one country can be integrated into applications with functionality developed

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 in other countries – and with the ability to localize the application in whatever language(s)
the user desires. This is a powerful capability that enables end users to leverage their total
global engineering force, and implement similar automation and manufacturing
information strategies for use in many sites worldwide.

· To become truly “OEM-able”

A driving force for Wonderware has been to supply a common infrastructure to OEM
product suppliers, to enable them to build their applications more efficiently and with a
higher degree of engineering reuse. OEMs now can concentrate on their particular
expertise while leveraging the common services in the ArchestrA framework to customize
systems efficiently, to reduce the development investment needed and to make products
faster and more efficiently. This can be a significant advantage to end users who make use
of multiple OEM suppliers, since all products will be built on a common framework. with
seamless integration and scalable evolution for the future.

Enhancements to FactorySuite
Even though most people haven’t yet discovered the full functionality of FactorySuite,
Wonderware’s goal is to extend its current rich function set with new products that bring specific
value and leverage the advantages of the new ArchestrA framework. The company’s product
strategy is continuing to drive functionality upward while driving down the cost of ownership – all
by building on the common set of services provided by ArchestrA.

Fundamental to this strategy is seamless integration with existing FactorySuite products to provide
an upgrade path to new versions of existing components. This evolution of FactorySuite will involve
two major phases during the next few years:

· FactorySuite A2 Release Jan 2002

· FactorySuite Next Generation

The FactorySuite A2 is an upgrade to the existing suite components, with the addition of a new
component called “Industrial Application Server,” which functions as a backbone server. Other
component upgrades can take advantage of the application server through a common names space.
This application is targeted at distributed systems or systems that require scalability to provide a
natural N Tier architecture with:

· A client layer that is thin client application only, no matter whether users deploy
InTouch, Terminal Services for InTouch or SuiteVoyager.
· A plant-centric application layer (the application server) at which the logic execution
takes place for scripting, events, alarm detection, data acquisition and scaling. This
layer replaces much of the traditional data change, condition scripts and tag name
database, and provides the ability to model the plant according to its equipment and
functions by providing plant-centric context for the data.
· A production or process-centric application layer, providing the discrete production
and process/batch engine on top of the plant model.
· The data storage layer (IndustrialSQL Server) for time series process data and alarms,
event data, and InTrack or InBatch data for production and process databases.

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This architecture abstracts the logic engine from the clients, permitting scalability in the client layer
so many forms of clients can access the same plant model and have the ability to add new clients
independent of the application layer. Having the scalable application layer function independently
of the storage and client layers simplifies handling of increased loads due to new functionality being
added as a plant expands. This is accomplished through a unique namespace that is logically one
PC, but which can physically be many PCs.

For example, as InTouch applications grow, there is often a need to centralize tags or to expand
scripting functionality. By upgrading the InTouch applications to InTouch 8.0 and deploying the new
Application Server component, users can simply browse the Application Server namespace from
within InTouch and can add new tags, centralize them using hierarchical plant structures or add
scripting functions and serve them to clients with no impact on existing applications.

This new component is an excellent example of the many new advantages provided by the
ArchestrA framework for reusing engineering from one project to another or setting up templates
for common devices/ functions to enable efficient development and administration of applications.

With the additions of thin client and the scalable application server technologies during 2000,
Wonderware is now poised to make another significant addition to the component application
model with the new release of visualization management and engineering and expansion of
engineering services.

FactorySuite NG expands engineering services to provide development and configuration facilities

for all parts of an application. The integrated development environment (IDE) that has been
introduced with the application server now is the only configuration tool needed for managing
visualization, application, historization and production in an application. Users don’t even need to
install software from CDs. All aspects of the application, visualization and production models thus
are abstracted from the deployment layer, providing unprecedented scalability and flexibility for
end users.

Visualization management and engineering is enhanced with the introduction of the View Engine
and new graphical user interface editors. The significance of this is the ability to associate windows
and graphics so that functions created in the application server can now host visualization facets,
with animation defined as part of this function. This enables the associated graphic to be placed on
many different displays without having to redefine the animation, since the window or display has
its own unique identity in the namespace. This also provides the ability to create display templates,
through the placement of symbols and associated graphics on the display, and to render this display
on many view engines. Users now only need to change the display once and propagation of
changes happens automatically. Another benefit is that InTouch windows can be migrated to new
displays with their own unique identity, via a new migration utility.

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An Evolution Path for Existing Applications
Wonderware users asked for evolution of FactorySuite, with minimal impact on existing
applications, and the ability to enhance existing applications through additional new components or
migrating of existing components, or a mixture of both. Users wanted to be able to upgrade
existing applications with Wonderware's traditional three-button upgrade procedure for three
reasons:

· So new applications can co-exist with the new environment

· So that users can select what engineering will be migrated into the new name space
· And so that migration can take place in an incremental fashion

Through the evolution of FactorySuite, users now have utilities and tools to migrate InTouch
applications in any of three ways:

· Tag Migration to Structures

The application server supports hieratical plant structures, which provides significant
modeling advantages. A migration tool is provided to take structured tag databases from
InTouch into the new structure, where the instances of the plant devices are created
automatically from the model already existing in InTouch. The user can go from a flat
structure to a plant-centric structure with inherited advantages of a centralized name space.

· Script Migration
The application server supports InTouch “Quick Script” syntax so that existing data change
and condition scripts can be moved the new environment, and re-referenced. Much of the
intellectual property in InTouch applications today resides within these scripts, and users
have expressed to be able to move the scripts over, either as standalone functions or for
embedding within other plant-centric devices.

· Window Graphic Migration

With the introduction of SuiteVoyager 1.0, Wonderware introduced a conversion tool for
moving InTouch windows from the traditional .WIN file format to the open XML format.
This tool is being enhanced to move “windows” to “displays” so that all graphical
engineering is preserved.

Summary

This paper has only touched the tip of the iceberg regarding the significant changes being made to
enhance FactorySuite and to bring additional value to both new and existing FactorySuite users.
They provide logical extensions to the rich functionality of FactorySuite and enable continued use
of existing installations by enabling them to expand functionality and adapt to today’s competitive
marketplace.

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This path is an evolution not just of Wonderware’s FactorySuite but of all end user applications. It
provides the ideal path for evolving mature applications with minimal impact on the today’s
applications, while bringing significant functional, engineering and diagnostics/maintenance value.
The new ArchestrA framework has been based upon extensive research with both FactorySuite and
non-FactorySuite users. It provides new dimension in:

· Application engineering efficiency

· Project lifecycle Productivity
· Scalability
· Application / management and diagnostics

It also shows Wonderware’s commitment to forging new paths in the manufacturing

automation/information systems market, specifically designed to preserve customers’ existing
engineering investments while providing tools for building systems over the next decade and a half.

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