NOA Verification of Request

This article presents the Verification of Request (VOR) component of the Namur Open Architecture (NOA) concept, a mechanism which allows automated inspection, verification and integration of plant-external advisories into the core process control domain while maintaining its confidentiality, integrity, authenticity, accountability and availability requirements. These cloud based services allow extensive, big data analytics to be applied to a plants life and historical data, enabling predictive and model based optimizations. This paper summarizes the NOA approach to a structured, non-invasive acquisition and provisioning of these information. Obtaining results from data analytics does however not add value to the process itself without applying the results to the particular process – a step that currently requires manual intervention. Given a growing popularity of cloud based optimization services, manual processing and application of optimization suggestions will become a laborious and overwhelming task. VOR is an approach for reintegrating insights provided by third party, cloud based services into a plants process control systems with a high degree of automation while maintaining full operator control and transparency over the reintegration process. By integrating state of the art IT security by design, VOR safely boosts plant efficiency without scaling up human resources.