A group of leading manufacturing companies and software vendors have endorsed the Instrumentation, Systems, and Automation Society's (ISA) ISA-95 Enterprise-Control System Integration standards and World Batch Forum's (WBF) Business To Manufacturing Markup Language (B2MML) for the standard's implementation.

The companies made their endorsement at a plant-to-business interoperability workshop hosted by SAP and ARC Advisory Group.
Workshop attendees also discussed the establishment of an open vendor and user consortium to share knowledge and best practices for plant floor to business integration and to provide compliance certification for use of the B2MML and related standards.
In addition to SAP and ARC, participants included representatives from Apriso, Arla Foods, Datasweep, Dow Corning Corporation, DuPont Engineering, Eli Lilly, Emerson Process Management, Empresas Polar, GE Fanuc, General Mills, Invensys-Wonderware, LightHammer, MPDV, MPR de Venezuela, OSIsoft, Procter and Gamble, PSI Soft, Rockwell Automation, Rohm and Haas, SAB Miller, Siemens, and Yokogawa, as well as representatives from ISA and WBF.
The B2MML schemes, which were developed by WBF, are an XML implementation of the ISA-95 standard. It establishes a common definition and format for information exchange between shop floor systems and business systems.
Responding to an ARC survey, workshop attendees said they expect the use of the ISA-95 standard to deliver significant supply chain benefits to users. ARC expressed similar sentiments in a recent electronic newsletter.
"ARC believes that the time has come to make some real progress in the area of plant to business interoperability," the consulting firm wrote.
"Advances in technology as well as standards have brought us to the point where we believe a catalyst can effect some major changes, and we believe this initiative, ick-started by SAP, can be that catalyst. There is a huge amount of interest in this among our clients, and an overwhelming response from the manufacturing community."
Dave Emerson, chairman of WBF's XML working group, and Keith Unger, chairman of the ISA's SP-95 committee, have pointed out that key end-user companies that have adopted
ISA-95 and B2MML are reporting reductions in integration time and costs and greater agility in integrating plant floor systems with business systems.

Changing cyberthreats

Meanwhile, at the recent ISA Expo at Reliant Centre in Houston, infrastructure specialists were warned that attacks on industrial computer systems are no longer primarily from internal sources.
Cybersecurity experts told a panel including representatives from BP and the US Department of Homeland Security that 31percent of aindustrial intrusion' events between 1982 and 2000 were due to external sources. Accidents, inappropriate employee activity and disgruntled employees accounted for most of the problems. A similar figure had already been found in an FBI study.
However, externally generated events accounted for 70percent of all events between 2001 and 2003. This ties in with Deloitte & Touche's 2003 global security survey which found that 90percent of security breaches originate from outside a company.
The security experts suggested three possible reasons for this change. Firstly they pointed to the Code Red 19 July 2001 worm attack which meant that intrusions had become nondirected and automated. This leaves the control system just a target of opportunity rather than choice, they said.
Secondly, they pointed to common operation systems such as Windows 2000 and Linux and applications such as SQL server.
These now dominate the human machine interface and are vulnerable to a wide variety of common IT attacks and viruses.
Finally they pointed to the interconnection of critical systems which has created interdependencies that users have not been aware of in the past. For example, internet incidents can now indirectly affect a system that does not use the internet at all. This is what happened at a US electricity company which used a frame relay for its Scada network, believing it to be secure.

Unfortunately the frame relay provider utilised a common asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) system throughout its network backbone for a variety of its services, including commercial Internet traffic and the Scada frame relay traffic. A worm overwhelmed the ATM bandwidth, blocking Scada traffic to substations.
Companies were warned to take this move from internal to external threat sources into consideration when formulating their risk assessment processes. A good starting point, said the experts, is the UK's National Infrastructure Security Co-Ordination Centre (NISCC) report The electronic attack threat to Scada control & automation systems.