Overview of IBM App Connect for Manufacturing
IBM App Connect for Manufacturing (ACMfg) assists manufacturers to sense, share, visualize, and exploit factory data across enterprise and mobile applications without compromising plant-floor operational performance and security via non-destructive integration. Once devices, modules, and sensors are exposed through ACMfg, the value of aggregated and enriched data can start to be realised. ACMfg allows the information from the operation technology (OT) in use in factories to be brought into the enterprise IT for analysis, opening the way for greater efficiency and quality, making factories smarter. ACMfg comes with connectors to hundreds of different IT systems and protocols and supports popular factory and production standards like OPC-UA and MQTT with added security.
Power of Open Standards (OPC UA)
OPC is the interoperability standard for the secure and reliable exchange of data in the industrial automation space and in other industries. It is platform independent and ensures the seamless flow of information among devices from multiple vendors. The OPC standard is a series of specifications developed by industry vendors, end-users and software developers. These specifications define the interface between Clients and Servers, as well as Servers and Servers, including access to real-time data, monitoring of alarms and events, access to historical data and other applications.
App Connect for Manufacturing supplies built-in nodes that you can use to define your message flows.
- OP-UA-Input - The OPC-UA-Input node periodically requests information from the OPC UA Server to check whether the defined set of client items have new data.
- OPC-UA-Read - The OPC-UA-Read node connects and reads data from the OPC UA Server.
- OPC-UA-Write - The OPC-UA-Write node writes the specified values to an OPC server.
- OPC-UA-Method-Call - The OPC-UA-Method-Call node connects and call method from the OPC UA Server.
- Control Send and Control Receive - These nodes are used internally by the other ACMfg nodes for making sure that there is only one connection to the OPC server from one integration server. There should be only one "Control-Flow" using (Control-send and Control Receive node) per-integration server.
Industry Perspective
Manufacturing Perspective is a specific set of views within the Toolkit and is used for doing the following configuration required by the IBM® App Connect for Manufacturing client, during the process of creating a message flow.
- Connecting to the OPC UA server.
- Browsing the server address space.
- Configuring a Client Item by mapping to a Source Item.
- Associating the Client Item with a manufacturing node.
- Set up subscriptions to published manufacturing data.
The configuration can be done using different views present in the Manufacturing Perspective. Use the Manufacturing Perspective to create or update an existing client item for App Connect for Manufacturing nodes.
Using a simple drag and drop interface you define an App Connect for Manufacturing message flow in the Toolkit by using the built-in message flow nodes, each of which represents a set of actions that define a processing step. Each message flow includes a number of nodes, each of which represents a set of actions that define a processing step. When you want to run a message flow to process messages, you deploy it to an integration server process. The path that you create between one node and another is known as a connection. Create your own custom message flow by using the App Connect for Manufacturing built-in nodes. Use the Manufacturing Perspective to create or update an existing client item for App Connect for Manufacturing nodes so that the OPC UA server data is available in your message flow.
Pattern-based approach
ACMfg provides a built-in, pattern-based approach to the configuration and deployment of common manufacturing information flows. These patterns help transform production data into widely used industry-application formats that enable wider visibility of production activity with web-based monitoring. Patterns can be shared and easily updated by other developers to aid collaboration across the enterprise making it easy to deploy repeatable integrations across manufacturing plants geographically.
What's new in ACMfg V3.0.1 released on June 23rd 2022
Support for App Connect Version 12
- App Connect Enterprise v12 is the latest release of IBM integration.
- Integrate Manufacturing with SaaS Applications using our smart SaaS connectors.
- Unit Test with CI/CD pipelines for quality assurance
- Monitor manufacturing events as business transactions.
- Monitor performance
- Integrate manufacturing processes with many other protocols and data formats to unlock operational data.
Removal of database restrictions
- In previous release a database was a prerequisite for using the ACMfg perspective to store data source details and client mappings. In this latest release you now have a choice - you can use JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) files to store App Connect for Manufacturing data. You can either use JSON files or database system for data storage. By default, JSON files are used to store data source details, and client item mappings. For more information, see our documentation Storing App Connect for Manufacturing business data.
Container native licensing
- IBM App Connect for Manufacturing has been developed over many years and has adapted to the latest deployment trends. ACMfg can be deployed in traditional VM based servers or within containers and managed by any docker container manager like Kubernetes. ACMfg can be developed, deployed, and maintained as part of a CI/CD pipeline to enable flexibility and ease the burden of management.
What next?
Getting started with ACMfg is easy - You can download our developer editions without charge for developers. You can simulate factory data by using an OPC UA simulator ( for example - Prosys OPC UA Simulation Server) to test OPC UA client applications and learn the technology. The Simulation Server supports all the essential OPC UA features and is available for Windows, Linux and macOS.