Skip to content

OPC UA Information Modeling Enables Industry Collaborations

    Save the Date

    The 2017 calendar is marked-up with several regulatory deadlines across many industries. As supply chains evolve in complexity and scale, the coordination of all the moving parts of operations management tools and processes becomes increasingly challenging.

    In a recent survey by the International Quality & Productivity Center (IQPC, 2017), a pool of pharmaceutical industry operators was asked which area would they be focused in the short term, and the majority of them chose “overcoming technical interoperability and integration challenges.”

    The example reveals two significant aspects of modern operations:

    1. Businesses are mostly data driven.
    2. Data is easy to collect and store but difficult to retrieve and extract value from.

    The reality is that all systems are not created equal. A production planning application quantity value looks rather different than a PID controller set point; although the data might be the same (e.g., as part of a batch control recipe).

    After a few years, we find ourselves with a healthy number of integration standards so that automation devices can be easily integrated with consistency. For example, the very well-known IEC 61131 standard for PLCs; and for enterprise applications to communicate with control systems, the ISA 88 and 95 standards. And for specific industries, IEC 61850 for electric power systems and Open-SCS for pharmaceutical serialization.

    As information workflows cross competence domains in several directions, users and providers start looking for a way to coalesce those standards into a farther-reaching, whole-encompassing interoperability “grammar.”

    That is one of the main reasons why OPC UA was created…

    Read the White Paper

    By Costantino Pipero, Founder and Chief Technologist, Beeond, Inc


    More from Beeond

    OPC UA Developer Training
    Helping you develop an OPC UA certifiable product faster, and at a lower cost.

    When is the training?
    Training dates revolve around OPC Foundation North America Roadshow events. The schedule is as follows:

    Location Dates
    Philadelphia, PA Monday 7/10/2017 – Wednesday 7/12/2017
    Redmond, WA Monday 9/25/2017 – Wednesday 9/27/2017
    Toronto, ON Monday 10/2/2017 – Wednesday 10/4/2017

    Who should attend?
    Experienced software developers, who are familiar with computer networks, operating systems concepts, industrial automation, and physical computing should attend. You should be competent in at least one of the following programming languages: C/C++, .NET, JavaScript, etc.

    What you will learn?
    Attendees will learn to apply the OPC UA standard to different scenarios and platforms, in a Server and Client application, leveraging the public stacks and reference implementations. You will learn to ensure reliable and secure communications by enabling infrastructure support, interoperability with different systems, and in different vertical integrations through modeling of information in OPC UA.

    To learn more and register: click here.