Manufacturing Industry Innovation 3.0
South Korea is pursuing the smart factory based on its “Manufacturing Industry Innovation 3.0 (MII3.0)” in response to the paradigm shift of the fourth Industrial Revolution. MII3.0 is aiming for three achievements:
- High productivity
- High flexibility
- High resource awareness
Through three technologies:
- Automation
- Production
- ICT (Information and Communication Technology)
By 2020, the goal is to spread smart factory technology to 10,000 enterprises in cooperation with major domestic and foreign companies. In particular, OPC UA will be used as an industrial standard to connect OT (Operational Technology) and IT (Information Technology).
The first event of OPC Korea was just held during “Smart Factory Expo + Automation World” in Seoul from March 28-30, 2017. Personally, it was my first travel to Korea to join in the first OPC-Day Korea, which was very successfully organized by Dr. Song’s team from KETI. 180 attendees listened to presentations from the likes of LG CNS, MDS, LSIS, Modigm, Fraunhofer Germany, Siemens, Microsoft, and myself. The OPC booth showed an OPC UA adoption wall including devices that even I have never seen before like the Rockwell 5480 controller with an integrated OPC UA server. Members like Microsoft, MDS, Softing, Rockwell, Cimon, Festo, and UVC acted as sponsors with a partner pod on the OPC booth to show off their services. Many attendees took a copy of the OPC UA brochure which is available in Korean language thanks to the help of OPC Korea.
For me, this was an impressive journey talking to lot of factory owners and integrators learning about their requirements. The world might be huge and we all live in different cultures –but at the end of the day, the challenges we engineers are trying to solve are similar and that’s why we have a common understanding.
Hannover Messe 2017
The next upcoming event is Hannover Messe, Germany. For the last few years we had roughly six sponsors on the OPC booth with a partner pod. This year we had to extend the booth to provide enough space for ten companies and organizations! These include AutomationML, BitCtrl, C-Labs, Kepware, MatrikonOPC, ProSys OPC, Softing, Siemens, Takebishi, and Unified Automation.
For the first time, we will show the experimental Testbed “OPC UA via TSN” where OPC UA delivers fully secured, reliable Machine to Machine interoperability via a TSN real-time tunnel. The OPC Foundation does not expect a quick market realization for this technology: even basics like the configuration of a multi-vendor TSN network are not fully standardized. However, we want to show the first results from OPC member companies involved in the testbed.
OPC UA Pub/Sub is nearly ready to released. At Hannover Messe we will see updated demos from the early adopter group including Beckhoff, Bosch-Rexroth, B&R, CAS, Honeywell, IBHSoftec, National Instruments, RTA, Softing, Sick, and Unified Automation. To show the very high speeds capable of OPC UA Pub/Sub via UDP (called ‘OPC UADP’), the company Sick integrated this technology into a vision camera scenario transferring live pictures.
Please stop by the OPC booth in Hall 9-A11 to see these demos – but also the grab a copy of the brand new VDMA guidance for small and medium companies and integrators regarding OPC UA and the concrete migration steps into factories. OPC Foundation is providing 4500 copies of this brochure at the booth, so make sure you get one in time.
I would like to highlight two more “must see” attractions at Hannover Messe:
- First, I invite you to visit the Microsoft booth in Hall 7 and talk to their technical OPC UA team to learn the tremendous steps Microsoft made over last year with respect to their OPC UA integration into the Azure cloud. This Azure/OPC display was already one of the most attractive parts of Microsoft booth. Last year, the Microsoft Azure team showed how to easily push telemetry data from device to cloud, but optionally also manage devices with command & control from the cloud to devices. This year even more thrilling scenarios will be released – which we can’t mention yet due to NDA. Don’t miss this!
- Second, check out the SAP booth in Hall 7 and see their live production demo “Open Integrated Factory – Generation 2017” which is the result of the consortia from companies like SAP, Beckhoff, Kuka, Asentics, Schunk, cab, eos, Honeywell, Mettler-Toledo, ProGlove , and Atlas Copco. The demo shows how operation technology and business management software have never been closer together. All assets like robots, transport systems, printers, scales and more are providing their services via OPC UA to SAP –this is a SoA (Service-oriented-Architecture) in a real world industrial scenario. Most production assets don’t know about each other but SAP is able to orchestrate the flow of a lot-size-one product through a production line.
This will be my 23rd year at Hannover Messe, and this year more than ever, I can’t wait to show and see thrilling new things and also to meet with you.
Please join us: https://opcfoundation.org/event-details/?ee=54