What communication protocol is popular in bio automation system?

[Thang Nguyen]

Hi,

I used to work with oil&gas industry which use OPC or modbus, then I work with agriculture vehicle which use CAN. I don't really know what they use to communicate between systems, instrument in bio automation manufacture or lab environment. Could you please share some information with me?

Thank you in advance!

[Lior Bilia]

I think each instrument will have its own drivers and API. There is no interface standard or even a drive to have one in this field. CAN, Modbus, GPIB and other standards exist because there was an effort by many different companies to have this interoperability. These days, each company is trying to lock you into its own ecosystem.

[ensegre]

For my experience, when it is about lab equipment, each device comes along with its own serial communication command set, if not all together proprietary handling dll. Which creates a job case for a lab automation integrator like I act for, many times. Industry standard bus protocols are implemented only in devices which scale to factory floor. Robotic components, generic remote i/o and plant controllers are the exceptions which come to my mind, as they cater to the generic PLC ecosystem.

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

Same as other mentioned. If your device comes with a proprietary serial protocol over RS-232, you can consider yourself lucky as at least the electrical layer of that interface is standardized. Alternatives are USB, which sometimes come with Virtual Serial Ports, making them on a similar level than good ol RS-232, but quite often require their own proprietary driver and only are compatible with the vendors software or an expensive SDK from them.

Some vendors claim to have developed the super duper vendor independent communication standard, only to let you find out that they are really only compatible to themselves and sometimes not even across different series of instruments from the same manufacturer. They try to sell you their latest and greatest lab automation software that works perfectly with their devices and only sometimes in rather mediocre ways with other devices through complicated gateways and specially sold and expensive interface solutions.

Generally it is a lot of marketing hype and sunshine, until you try to combine two or more systems from different vendors together. 

[Thang Nguyen]

I worked in company building EOL test systems for different manufactures which use TestStand and LabVIEW so I understand what need to communicate with different devices and instruments. Now my current company builds bio instrument and there is a requirement from our customers to integrate our instrument to their automation systems. That is why I would like to understand what is the standard of bio automation systems since I don't know much about the automation in bio industry. Now, I guess there is not much different with other industries.

Thank you everyone.

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

5 minutes ago, Thang Nguyen said:

I worked in company building EOL test systems for different manufactures which use TestStand and LabVIEW so I understand what need to communicate with different devices and instruments. Now my current company builds bio instrument and there is a requirement from our customers to integrate our instrument to their automation systems. That is why I would like to understand what is the standard of bio automation systems since I don't know much about the automation in bio industry. Now, I guess there is not much different with other industries.

Thank you everyone.

In my experience there is indeed not. The standard is more or less whatever Koolaid your client has been buying into. 😀

[Thang Nguyen]

Thanks for all your inputs. 

[VDB]

The industry is trying to establish unified communication standards for laboratory and bioprocess equipment in the last years, for example LADS and SILA. But these need to be adopted by the market and only the newest hardware will support them Like in any other industry you will always have existing older equipment and manufacturers that implement their own proprietary protocols. So the short answer is: in practice you need to know about all sorts of hardware and protocols... 

I work for a bioreactor manufacturer that needs to comply with a whole zoo of regulations (FDA, GMP, GAMP, iSO 13485 to name a few). Reliability, correctness of data, cyber security etc. etc. become more important day by day. That's why I'm only using OPC UA and the companion standards for all internal and external communications.

[JKSH]

12 hours ago, VDB said:

The industry is trying to establish unified communication standards for laboratory and bioprocess equipment in the last years

(Not to downplay the importance of standardization, but rather highlighting that it's hard. And as @VDB said the old ones will hang around for a lifetime)

Edited December 22, 2023 by JKSH

[ShaunR]

6 hours ago, JKSH said:

(Not to downplay the importance of standardization, but rather highlighting that it's hard. And as @VDB said the old ones will hang around for a lifetime)

To be fair. Those that VDB suggested aren't really protocols, they are middleware. One is based on OPC, the other is a translation service into an API. SILA is interesting in that it's basically what CoAPs does so I think your cartoon would definitely apply there

Personally. I think they should just make all devices SCPI compliant and be done with it 

Edited December 22, 2023 by ShaunR