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The Truth About CFX

A great milestone in digital assembly manufacturing has been reached by having the IPC Connected Factory Exchange (CFX) industrial internet of things (IIoT) standard in place with an established, compelling commitment of adoption. First, it’s important to understand how we got to this point. Second, we will look ahead to the not-too-distant future, where Industry 4.0 solutions within digital smart factories will become a reality that is available and accessible to everyone without any risk of vendor dependency or technology obsolescence.

CFX To Date

CFX started as an idea from senior members within IPC who long recognized the inevitable need for a factory-wide communication standard. Having seen the fate of several attempts at standards from various areas within the industry come and go over many years, this was not something for the faint-hearted—especially considering the fiercely competitive nature of industry vendors. The very first CFX group meeting at 2016 IPC APEX EXPO attracted an impressive attendance from numerous competing vendors across all disciplines. Prior to CFX, such a situation would surely have become somewhat rowdy. However, the meeting was the first sign of the magic that CFX would bring. Competitors sat together in agreement with the common intent to change the industry for the better.

Over time, critical elements of the CFX standard were put into place. The initial goals—to include all active manufacturing and supporting processes, as well as be completely plug and play—seemed quite ambitious at the time. It was critical to create a standard that would fulfill the needs of smart, modern manufacturing in the digital factory with true Industry 4.0 functionality. This was the common expectation from everyone’s customer base, whether or not they could articulate what they wanted.

The analogy of an IIoT standard being like the cellphone brought the message home for many people. Having a standard that governs how telephone handsets from different vendors work on standard networks allows us to communicate freely, which equates in CFX as the protocol and data-encoding methods that were selected. The third critical piece—which no other standard has been able to completely define—is the language used. It does not work to a cellphone conversation where the two parties speak different languages and cannot understand a word the other is saying. For true plug and play, all parties have to communicate with a common language.

In the case of CFX, the decision on the protocol was contentious, as there were a small number of realistic options and the support for each was strong. However, the requirements for CFX were quite clear. The protocol had to be secure and have encrypted data options when sending data externally—for example, to the cloud. A data compression facility also needed to be available to reduce data-rate requirements. Real-time operations, such as machines, did not have to care whether anyone or everyone was receiving their messages. Thus, a “send-it-and-forget-it” facility for broadcast messages, featuring a message broker, was a must.

In addition, a direct point-to-point connection for immediate command and response messaging was also required. As a consensus, the AMQP v1.0 protocol—having proven itself in the banking industry—was seen as the only logical choice that addressed all of these requirements. The availability of open-source, free-of-charge AMQP v1.0 brokers also fell completely in line with the open principles of the standard. Data encoding was a far simpler decision with JSON being accepted pretty unanimously, so messages could be read by humans and yet also be efficient in a modern format already familiar to web developers.

Having these elements decided, the work then fell on the data content definition. There had not been a precedent for the definition of data content on the assembly factory shop floor. Very few people have ever gained a complete understanding of all the various content areas across manufacturing that need to be defined. A wide cross-section of experts in the industry was needed to describe events and parameters of processes across all technologies in a detailed, yet neutral, way. A breakthrough idea within the CFX team was to create groups of messages of related data content that were logical base topics that defined a granular discrete system or machine capability rather than creating specific messages for each machine type. The topics were created to be used as building blocks, so that any machine or transactional process on the shop floor—past, present or future—could be precisely modelled by putting together the relevant topics.

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