THE PROBLEM

Manufacturing Data Silo Proliferation and API Chaos

As manufacturers adopt different software stacks from multiple vendors, application developers must build against incompatible, programming interfaces for systems like historians, production, quality and maintenance systems. This severely limits application portability and innovation. The industry risks repeating the fragmentation of the past—only now at the API layer.

THE SOLUTION

A Vendor-Agnostic, Open, Common API

i3X™ provides a vendor-agnostic, open, common API for interacting with contextualized manufacturing information platforms, enabling scalable, AI-ready interoperability without locking organizations into proprietary platforms and APIs.

Enabling Scalable, Future-Proof Manufacturing Architectures

i3X™ brings together the best of OT and IT, enabling the use of modern software development methodologies against OT data and facilitating the standardization, portability and reusability of manufacturing architectures and solutions.  For manufacturers and solution providers, i3X will:

  • Reduce the cost and complexity of Smart Manufacturing systems acquisition, implementation and sustaining

  • Enable standardization of manufacturing data – for both existing and new implementations

  • Bring modern software development practices to OT

  • Empower 1.5 million IT analysts, developers and practitioners to create value from manufacturing systems

  • Enable AI at scale

  • Facilitate the formation of a Smart Manufacturing App development ecosystem building solutions against a common API (not proprietary infrastructure) 

OPEN BY DESIGN

i3X™ proposes a common Open API specification that any contextualized manufacturing information platform can implement, regardless of vendor or underlying technology. Rather than forcing data to be re-wired through brokers or custom middleware, i3X standardizes how applications interact with information platforms themselves.

  • Vendor-neutral: Works on top of any information layer

  • Composable: Supports single-vendor or multi-vendor architectures

  • Opinionated but minimal: Defines essential capabilities every rich information platform must expose 

CORE CAPABILITIES

An information platform implementing i3X must support a common set of primitive operations, including the ability to:

  • Discover available namespaces

  • Explore object types (classes) and their definitions

  • Retrieve instances of those object types

  • Navigate hierarchical and non-hierarchical relationships

  • Query current (real-time) values

  • Query historical values

  • Update current and historical data (where permitted)

  • Subscribe to changes and events

These primitives form the foundation for advanced manufacturing use cases, analytics, and AI applications. 

Manufacturing Interoperability

This API initiative is an international effort to establish a common, vendor-agnostic API for contextualized manufacturing information, ensuring that app developers can create value once, and deploy it against multiple back-end systems. We aim to maximize application portability and innovation.

By defining a standardized set of graph-aware, protocol-agnostic server primitives that any platform can implement, this effort aims to do for industrial manufacturing what Apple and Android did for mobile: create a unified interface contract that enables a vibrant ecosystem of portable applications—analytics, visualization, and ML/AI tools—that can run across any compliant platform.

This ultimately benefits end users through greater choice, faster innovation, and reduced vendor lock-in, while still allowing platform vendors to differentiate on capabilities.

i3X_BusinessValue

Meet the Working Group Behind i3X

The i3X working group brings together a cross-section of manufacturers, technology providers, system integrators, and industry leaders collaborating to define an open, vendor-agnostic API that enables scalable, future-proof manufacturing intelligence.

HighByte-8
GE_Appliances
Georgia-Pacific
Rockwell_Automation
Inductive_Automation
AWS-1
Microsoft-1
Siemens
ThinkIQ-1

Smart Manufacturing Imperatives

CESMII’s three Smart Manufacturing Architecture Imperatives represent a foundational set of requirements that address this demand for interoperability. We are advocating for open, standards-based information modeling (SM Profiles), interoperable platform requirements, and a common API that can drive scalability, reduce complexity, and unlock real-time value from manufacturing data across systems, applications, and the supply chain. 
SM IMPERATIVE #1
Open, Standards-Based Information-Modeling Strategy for Manufacturing (& related Supply Chain) Devices, Assets & Processes

  • Leverage and contribute to a global community building information models (SM Profiles)

SM IMPERATIVE #2
A Clear Set of Requirements Enabling Manufacturing Platform and Application Interoperability (Compliance = SM Interoperability Platform)

  • Instantiate SM Profiles as Type Safe Objects from the SM Marketplace

  • Persist Instance Objects & Relationships (present and past) in a Knowledge Graph

SM IMPERATIVE #3
Create an open, common API for Manufacturing Systems, Rapid App Dev, Scaling AI Deployments, EAI, Supply Chain Optimization…

  • Establish a standard API, consisting of a base set of server primitives that a wide array of platforms can implement to commoditize access to manufacturing data