The OPC Foundation increases the adoption of OPC UA by collaboration with other trade organizations. “We have signed collaboration agreements with Profibus & Profinet International, ESPG (Powerlink), Sercos International, and m2m-Alliance,” announced Stefan Hoppe at the OPC Foundation press conference at the SPS Show. These organizations use OPC UA as a secure transport channel to reach interoperability to other systems.
“In PI we see OPC UA as a complementary technology for PROFINET, the leading Industrial Ethernet standard in Automation. The ability to run both services in one network will open entirely new possibilities and will be the foundation for mega trends like IIoT and Industry 4.0,” says Karsten Schneider, Chairman PI (PROFIBUS & PROFINET International).
“The tight collaboration of our both organizations and technologies will be a breakthrough for seamless communication from ERP systems down to the sensor level,” says Stefan Schönegger, Managing Director of the EPSG. And Peter Lutz, Managing Director Sercos International documents the collaboration already with results: his organization has worked independently on their own OPC UA Companion Specification.
The OPC Foundation and the M2M Alliance e.V., the largest professional M2M association in Europe, will be working together for a seamless and secure communication from the field devices to the backend systems. “It is becoming more and more important to adapt the well-established solutions from other M2M-application domains, like health-card or smart metering, to the special requirements of industrial automation,” says Prof. Dr.-Ing. Axel Sikora, member of the board of the M2M Alliance e.V.
The topic of cooperation was also the focus of the common press conference of OPC Foundation and FDT Group on Wednesday: “Meaningful information about the status of a machine/system is the key to the business model of tomorrow, “ Glen Schulz, Managing Director of the FDT Group, is sure about. “Two of the most popular standards in factory and process automation have now teamed up to allow the user a never been there access to real time information in his enterprise.” Besides, the FDT Standard is the core to get access to information of millions of FDT-capable devices in the field. On the other side, the OPC standard offers the infrastructure to use the data on thousands of applications and platforms. The teamwork of these two standards enables the sensors to provide information transparently through networks and topologies. Mobile devices, ERP Systems, the Cloud and IIOT/ Industry 4.0 are already considered in the architecture.
OPC UA is already used in Industrie 4.0. With the technologically driven enhancements like Pub/Sub and AMQP it has the potential to become an accepted worldwide standard for IIoT.