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Compliance Corner

    Welcome to the Compliance Corner, let me introduce myself, I’m Paul Hunkar, the Director of Compliance and Certification for the OPC Foundation. This repeating addition to the newsletter will be where we will talk about what is new or important in OPC Foundation Certification. We have had many activities in the last several months, including interoperability events, new releases, and other updates.

    We just completed a very successful North American IOP event, hosted by Honeywell in Phoenix. We had 28 attendees, who spent the week checking the interoperability between their OPC UA Servers and Clients as well as enjoying the perfect weather. We also had a few attendees that checked the interoperability of their versions of the MDIS information model. The attendees were treated to short presentations about the latest activities of the OPC Foundation (Tom Burke), latest technical changes “What’s new in OPC UA 1.04” (Paul Hunkar) and “What’s new in certification” (Alexander Almendinger).  The presentations were well received by the attending developers. The developers were able to work with the Global Discover Server (GDS) provided by Microsoft, allowing them to check certificate handling in what would be a more common industrial environment. The GDS will be part of all future IOPs.

    Alexander, who is the director of the European test lab also provided access and assistance with Compliance Test Tool (CTT) usage. This was very helpful especially since the OPC Foundation has released version 1.03 of the CTT, with extended support for OPC UA version 1.03. With this release, OPC Foundation accredited Test Labs will be able to test the current release of the OPC UA specification as well as older releases (up to the last three) of the OPC Foundation specifications.

    OPC Foundation accredited Test Labs are also gearing up to provide information model testing, with the MDIS information model likely to be the first. Any information model that has defined testing can be added the test schedule. The test labs have been busy, with the growing demand for Certification in the last several months. The following companies have had products recently certified: OPC Labs, Omron, ShenYang Institute of automation Chinese Academy of Sciences, Schneider Electric, Weintek Labs Inc, Unified Automation GmbH, TSI Inc, and GE Healthcare Bio-Sciences AB.

    The Compliance and Certification Working Group, which meets weekly, has provided updated test lab specifications to make it easier for vendors to understand what is provided by the OPC Foundation accredited test labs. It is available at: https://opcfoundation.org/developer-tools/certification-specifications/certification-specifications/. The Working Group is working on further expanding the scope of the automated testing provided by the CTT and also on the testing for the newly released 1.04 version of the OPC UA specification. For any questions related to certification, test labs, information model testing or if you would like to help the certification program please feel free to contact us at: compliance_AT_opcfoundation.org