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    MxD Institute Chooses ADI, Siemens to Develop First-of-its-Kind Open Process Automation Testbed at Chicago Facility
    1. Research and Development

    MxD Institute Chooses ADI, Siemens to Develop First-of-its-Kind Open Process Automation Testbed at Chicago Facility

    Oct. 28, 2024
    The highly flexible testbed will showcase the advantages open process automation, digital twin, and artificial intelligence technologies can provide for manufacturers.

    MxD (Manufacturing times digital), one of many manufacturing institutes that's part of Manufacturing USA, has chosen Applied Dynamics International (ADI) to lead the design and installation of an Integrated Open Process Automation (OPA) Testbed at its factory floor in Chicago, Illinois.

    Scheduled to be completed in mid-2025, the project is a collaboration with MxD, Siemens, and the University of Michigan's Barton Research Group. The highly flexible Integrated OPA Testbed is the first of its kind and will showcase the advantages of open process automation and demonstrate the value that digital twin and machine learning technologies can provide for manufacturers. 

    ADEPT Software Platform

    ADEPT is an industrial edge computing and connectivity software platform that provides an
    open platform that offers access to high-quality industrial data at affordable costs. It's used across the global aerospace and defense industry but also scales down to work with low-cost computing hardware and open-source, real-time Linux. It provides comprehensive out-of-the-box capability and supports open real-time and virtual computing applications that require NIST 800-171 and CIS Security Level 2 compliance.

    Siemens PCS neo

    SIMATIC PCS neo manages and automates industrial processes entirely through the web, allowing users to access and operate the system from any location. With full support for the Module Type Package (MTP) standard, it allows for easier integration of plant modules, regardless of the manufacturer.

    The vision for the testbed involves integrating two existing MxD testbeds, the Digital Twin Testbed for Process Manufacturing from Siemens, and the Open Architecture Digital Twin Testbed into one system,  combining their strengths.

    "The proposed testbed represents a unique opportunity to push the boundaries of standard industrial manufacturing practices," said Max Toothman, a Sr. AI Engineer at ADI and the principal investigator for the project. "This collaborative effort will combine a number of cutting-edge technologies into an interoperable system that can be used to test control and analysis methods from recent Industry 4.0 research."

    Detailing compliance with the Open Process Automation Standard (O-PAS), this new testbed will use multiple control nodes to connect real-time edge computing capabilities, through ADI's ADEPT platform, with industrial control software through Siemens' SIMATIC PCS Neo platform.

    Local and cloud-hosted applications will allow researchers to deploy adaptive and extensible digital twins. With this digital twin technology, machine learning and artificial intelligence can be leveraged to enable process monitoring, anomaly detection, and predictive maintenance, among other tasks.