Rhize 3.0

Rhize version 3.0 is now in general release! 🥳 As a full rewrite of our earlier Libre 2.0 application, this release functionally announces a new product.

Read more to learn about the features available in the Rhize Manufacturing Data Hub.

What is Rhize?

Rhize is the world’s first manufacturing data hub. It collects event data emitted from all levels of a manufacturing process, stores this data in a standardized schema, and exposes access to the event stream so users can orchestrate workflows in real-time.

Customers use Rhize to observe and react to past and present states of their manufacturing operation. Its use cases include:

• A single source of truth for manufacturing records. With manufacturing events represented as a knowledge graph, Rhize provides access to any view of the system through a single query to a single endpoint. You can query detailed reports about a specific asset, such as a manufacturing batch, or compare production across broad categories, for example, between equipment items or production lines.
• A backend for custom MES and MOM applications. As the data hub has a message broker and real-time database, operators can program custom level-three applications for functions such as track and trace, material genealogy, electronic batch record creation, and KPI calculations.
• An integrator of legacy systems. Rhize accepts data from legacy systems and converts them to a standardized schema. Thus, it serves as a hub to communicate between legacy systems in ways that would otherwise be impossible or very difficult to maintain.

Features

Each of the following features supports Rhize’s key design goals:

• Provide a highly reliable means to collect manufacturing data from varied sources
• Standardize this data in a way that accurately places it within an event in the context of an entire manufacturing operation
• Offer a programmable engine to write custom logic to process the data and send it between systems
• Serve as a complete backend application and architecture for MES/MOM frontends
• Expose this system through an interface that is accessible to the widest number of stakeholders in the manufacturing operation.

Knowledge graph and GraphQL

Data is stored in the Rhize DB, a graph database with a custom schema that uses the ISA-95 standard as a data model. This database provides several advantages over a relational database or data lake:

• Standardization. The database schema enforces standardization using a data model that adequately represents an entire manufacturing operation. All data stored in Rhize has a common structure, unlike the heterogeneous data of a data lake.
• Graph Structures. The graph database represents the object model of ISA-95 exactly. Every event in a manufacturing process is connected to all other events. For example, a job response might have associated operations requests, personnel, equipment, and materials that are consumed and produced. All these objects have their associated classes, instances, and contexts (where context could be a time range, operations segment, or zone of information exchange).
• Intuitive, minimal queries. The Rhize DB is exposed through a GraphQL API, which provides a complete interface through a single endpoint. Users query exactly what they want without needing to handle the relational algebra of SQL or the over-fetching of a REST API.

With standardization, graph structure, and complete interfaces, the Rhize DB thus constitutes a knowledge graph that represents the entire state of a manufacturing operation. Users use this knowledge graph to run simulations, discover optimizations, and train machine-learning models for predictive analysis.

You can read and write to the knowledge graph through a GraphQL explorer, a BPMN workflow, a custom frontend, or through the Modeling UI. To learn how to use GraphQL for manufacturing analysis, read the Rhize guide to GraphQL.

Modeling UI

The Rhize UI is a graphical interface to model and store the objects in your manufacturing process. Without needing programming knowledge, your operators can use the Admin UI to define the items in your role-based equipment hierarchy. For example, you can create and associate equipment with equipment classes, hierarchy scopes, data sources, and segments―all the objects that change infrequently.

These models provide the foundational data objects to associate with the dynamic data that you collect, analyze, and handle during ongoing operations. To learn more, read the Model objects guide and its corresponding topic that describes the Master definitions and fields.

Low-code workflow orchestration

While some aspects of manufacturing, such as the plant site, are constant, most manufacturing data is emitted dynamically during production. Rhize’s BPMN editor provides a graphical interface to listen to events, write logic based on event conditions, and process data to send to other devices or store in the knowledge graph. It has gateways to represent conditions, messaging to subscribe and publish to topics, and a JSON interpreter to transform variables and process manufacturing data in batches.

For example, you can write a BPMN workflow to do any combination of the following:

• Automatically write the values associated with a specific job to the database
• Evaluate incoming data for conditions and write logic to transform this data and send it
• Subscribe and publish to topics, coordinating communication between systems
• Listen to events and read and write machine data through OPC-UA

To get started, read the Guides to Use BPMN and Write rules to trigger workflows from data source values.

Agent and message broker

Rhize collects data from multiple data sources and protocols. To bridge the Rhize system with your devices, Rhize has an agent to collect data from OPC UA and MQTT servers. The Rhize agent listens for your devices’ messages and publishes them to the message broker.

Based on NATS, Rhize’s message broker decouples communication through a publish-and-subscribe pattern. Rhize BPMN workflows can subscribe to topics and publish topics back. On your side, your manufacturing devices can publish topics to Rhize and subscribe to topics that are published from some BPMN trigger or to changes in the database. You can also use Rhize workflows to publish and subscribe to topics on an external broker.

To learn more, read the guide to Connect a data source and the reference for Agent Configuration.

Audit trails

Manufacturing often happens in strict regulatory environments and in systems where security is critical. The Rhize audit log maintains a record of all changes that happen in the system. To learn more, read the Audit guide.

Secure, vendor-agnostic infrastructure

Rhize is built on open standards and heavily uses open-source cloud infrastructure. As such, Rhize is designed to conform to your operation’s IT and manufacturing processes.

Rhize runs on your IT infrastructure. The data model itself is based on a widely recognized standard, ISA-95. Your teams control its security and access policies, with authentication provided through OpenID Connect.

High availability and reliability

Mission-critical systems, such as an MES, must be highly reliable and available. Information flows in manufacturing can also have very high demands for CPU, network throughput, and memory.

The design of Rhize accommodates horizontal scaling, where the application runs in clusters of multiple computers. This distributed execution ensures that the system continues functioning during upgrades, periods of high use, and momentary failures in single nodes. Specifically, Rhize uses Kubernetes for container orchestration, a distributed, ACID-compliant database, and a message broker that uses replication to harden against failure.

The reliance on open source also means that your operators do not need to learn a specialized skill to deploy Rhize. It uses the same cloud-native applications that power the modern web.

Read all about how to Deploy Rhize in the Deploy guides.

A backend for MES applications

With the knowledge graph, message broker, and workflow executor, and secure infrastructure, Rhize also provides all the components necessary to write custom applications for Manufacturing Execution Systems. Rather than rely on a vendor to sell an MES system that prescribes exactly what data it can use and how it can use this data, use Rhize to build the custom MES frontend of your choice.

Combined with rapid prototyping and low-code tools, you can use Rhize to build MES applications quickly and iterate on them as your operators use them in production.

Install

To install, read the Install guide. Or, if upgrading from a release candidate, use the Upgrade guide. If upgrading, be sure to review the changelog to be aware of any possible breaking changes.

When you install, check the container images against these checksums:

BPMN engine:
registry.gitlab.com/libremfg/bpmn-engine:v3.0.0
sha256:92ef7bd7655736fc424b749f757358587b8ae21a994320c0e3dbd596b0d8e1f2

Libre Admin UI:
registry.gitlab.com/libremfg/frontend/libre-admin-ui:v3.0.0
sha256:64963e65c1e44abd973617d71d00db7500d684178529bf8335eb4a2974b412e8

Libre Agent:
registry.gitlab.com/libremfg/libre-agent:v3.0.0
sha256:037dca7b8cde5f3cd9505de50ba20da2454d292b19860be5de17a03fd4355625

Libre Audit:
registry.gitlab.com/libremfg/libre-audit:v3.0.0
sha256:764826140cd2da7764670c22b83914f51459cb2091eaee50a4fb046316e9fcbc

Libre BaaS:
registry.gitlab.com/libremfg/baas:v3.0.0
sha256:8763118064f0ee0230801114fd8534e76d0db51119dd3077913d3a54276c7621

Libre Core:
registry.gitlab.com/libremfg/libre-core:v3.0.0
sha256:cdd97fc7243a06c6eafe65e32a65902084c0fc591fc4bfbf7ceee7012dccde0

Libre Keycloak theme:
registry.gitlab.com/libremfg/frontend/libre-keycloak-theme:v3.0.0
sha256:7ed4cabf4ac7c3d65eac50412f8c3619ad9b971ef835797d8275ee65b93e372f

Libre router init:
registry.gitlab.com/libremfg/libre-router-init:v3.0.0
sha256:c4217c0d5a3f079dd751570f725d381a327c1ab00189bd593ac221a86036c98e

Libre Audit Postgres:
registry.gitlab.com/libremfg/libre-audit/postgres:v3.0.0
sha256:fb18a4fcb22ad76d4b8e4c404a3a5faf4207835166061d99ffd36801064752ab

Download v3.0.0-checksums.txt

Changelogs

The following changelogs document the features, fixes, and refactoring that went into this release.

• 3.0.0
• 3.0.0rc09
• 3.0.0rc08
• 3.0.0rc07
• 3.0.0rc06
• 3.0.0rc05

Read more

• Get started introduces Rhize’s application and architecture.
• Manufacturing data hub explains why Rhize chose its design.
• Use cases explains ways customers use Rhize.