By Tom Burke, President and Executive Director of the OPC Foundation
This edition of the OPC Connect newsletter focuses on OPC engagement with building automation.
Collaboration is more than just a strategic objective of the OPC Foundation; it is an effective way to engage other organizations to use the OPC UA information model architecture and develop corresponding companion specifications between industrial automation and related domains.
Since October 2012, we have had an active working group and collaboration between BACnet Interest Group Europe and the OPC Foundation. The fruits of the labor of this working group are about to be released as a companion specification at the end of this year. This particular endeavor allows us to have a mapping of the BACnet objects into an OPC UA namespace truly allowing information integration to be shared between industrial automation systems and building automation systems. We are also mapping OPC UA objects so that they can be used interchangeably in the BACnet world.
Both organizations already have commitments from a number of vendors to release products based on OPC UA and the BACnet companion specification by the third quarter of 2015.
This issue begins to highlight some of the success stories that we already have from our OPC vendors deploying products that solve critical integration opportunities between industrial automation and building automation.