Peer Review of PERA Website Materials


The "Purdue Reference Model for CIM" was developed by the CIM Reference Model Committee of the International Purdue Workshop on Industrial Computer Systems, a major activity of the Purdue Laboratory for Applied Industrial Control (PLAIC). This document was peer reviewed and approved by senior representatives of the 27 industrial and academic organizations participating. A full list of these may be viewed in Appemdix VI of the book.

The Model for CIM was published in book form in October, 1989 by the Instrument Society of America. During part of this development period, Ted Williams served as President of the ISA and several ISA members also reviewed the book.

The Purdue Enterprise Reference Architecture (PERA) is a model or framework showing the relationship of the major steps involved in carrying out an enterprise integration program or a systems engineering project. The second and probably more important component, is the associated methodology or step-by-step method for actually carrying out the project or program itself. The Purdue Master Planning Methodology was also developed by the Industry-Purdue University Consortium for CIM. The resulting "PERA Handbook of Master Planning" was updated frequently by PLAIC after its initial development. This work was led by Dr. Williams, Hong Lee and Gary Rathwell with assistance from Shelby Laurents, William Bosler and Fluor Daniel. Since the objective was "to increase the readability and usefulness for the industrial practitioner", review and approval of this book was limited to the above contributors.

During this period, the PERA website was established by Gary Rathwell and Ted Williams with the assistance and support of many able volunteers.

When Ted retired and PLAIC was disbanded, the many practicioners who had participated in the original PERA development, continued to implement world-scale Enterprise Master Planning projects, many of which were overseas. This resulted in a "quiet period" for the PERA website as PERA procedures and documentation was developed by various groups for internal use.

In parallel with this project work, Shelby Laurents, Leon Steinocher, Bill Bosler, Frank Stieglitz, Ian Gibrson, and Gary Rathwell participated in ISA standards developent work including:

This allowed us to contribute to control system and cybersecurity standards while assuring that we "kept pace" with new industry developments. We also learned that even short "micro-Learning Modules" (MLMs) took many months for ISA to review, approve, and publish. Although over 50 MLMs and white pawers were identified, and drafts prepared for mny of them, It became clear that we would need a faster way to produce and publish this material. ISA 99 found that peer review, approval, publishing and general coordination of so much educational material was too great a distraction from their primary activity of standards development. Consequently, in early 2024, the ISA99-WG13 Educational Materials Working Group (co-chaired by Gary Rathwell and Vytautas Butrimas) was disbanded.

Starting in August 2024 we began a PERA Development and Update Program to address technology and practices that had evolved since our last updates to www.pera.net. This included cybersecurity, AI, Risk Management, and new networking technologies. Unlike ISA, PERA addresses all levels in enterprise architectures from plant sensor ot the board room. This makes issues like cybersecurity of ACS, OT and IT easier to address, and the PERA Master Planning process is an ideal tool for preparing a unified corporate plan for Cybersecurity, AI, Enterprise networks and even risk management.

This PERA update will introduce new technical concepts and practices and would benefit from peer review. Although we have determined that a classical standards review and approval process is too cumbersome for the volume and rate of processing required, we propose to implement a more efficient process. To this end, each MLM, White Paper or web page will include a "comments link" that will allow readers to email their input to the PERA website administrator. In the short term, these willl be used to implement a "dynamic peer review" process that will allow authors to improve their documents. In the longer term, it is planned to make these comments and the authors' responses visible to readers "on demand". This could also include an end-user rating that will be presented with each document.


We welcome your Comments and Suggestions

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