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Unified Namespace Architecture

Enabling Digital Transformation in Manufacturing

In today's fast-paced digital landscape, manufacturers face a common challenge: effectively accessing and organizing data across their enterprise. Without a standardized approach, data integration becomes cumbersome, leading to inefficiencies and missed opportunities. This hinders successful digital transformation and limits the full potential of data.

By adopting a Unified Namespace architecture, businesses gain a centralized and standardized system for seamless data integration, providing a unified view and a single source of truth. A UNS lays the foundation for a successful digital transformation journey, enabling effective data collection, organization, and utilization.

Benefits of a Unified Namespace Architecture

Standard Presentation of Data – even when underlying data has a different structure.
Simplified Integration - enabling the easy onboarding of new data sources and applications.
Reduced Costs – only one communication interface vs. multiple point-to-point connections.
Improved Agility – real-time data gives manufacturers the ability to improve their processes.

Building a Unified Namespace

A Unified Namespace system should scale effortlessly to handle growing data volumes and accommodate future data sources and applications. It ensures optimal performance and accessibility while allowing seamless integration with evolving technologies to adapt to changing business needs.

Technical Requirements to Support a Unified Namespace Architecture

The functional requirements of scalability and interoperability lead to the following minimum technical requirements for a:

Open Architecture: Interoperability is essential for effective communication and data exchange between diverse systems, applications, and devices. It should support standard data formats, protocols, and interfaces, enabling seamless data integration, leveraging existing infrastructure, and facilitating efficient collaboration with partners and suppliers.
Edge Driven: The intelligence pushes the payload. Data should be modeled with context as close to the source as possible – removing the need to do this repeatedly where it is consumed.
Report by Exception: Only changes are published, resulting in a more efficient architecture.
Lightweight: The protocols utilized should be lightweight and scalable to an enterprise solution.

MQTT Sparkplug B: Unified Namespace Architecture Considerations

What protocol makes the most sense for a UNS? Perform a bit of research on the topic and you’ll find this topic to be as polarizing as politics in some circles. Our research has shown that the prevailing opinion is that MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport) is the best-fit protocol to handle the real-time aspects of a UNS.

An MQTT broker is an intermediary entity that receives messages published by clients, filters the messages by topic, and distributes them to subscribers. Read this blog to learn the reasons most manufacturers choose MQTT.