Collaboration with numerous organizations beyond just industrial automation is the strategy and path forward to allow information integration from embedded devices to the cloud. New members and new products are emerging as end-users are looking for information solutions for IIoT, and the OPC UA technology is well-positioned to address these needs.
Numerous organizations continue to partner with the OPC Foundation and/or develop companion specifications for their respective information models to seamlessly plug into OPC UA. The collaboration partners are looking for seamless information integration, and OPC UA provides a complete solution expanding beyond simple IoT communication, providing secure reliable information integration. OPC UA information modeling leverages the communication infrastructure of both the client/server and publish/subscriber architectures to build scalable market-specific solutions.
For example, the VDMA has published eight new videos about their collaboration with the OPC Foundation. Here is an overview:
Of the eleven sections currently creating companion specifications, three have posted videos specifically describing their work:
- VDMA: Injection Molding
- VDMA: Vision Cameras
- VDMA: Robotics
Watch the new VDMA videos here:
https://opcfoundation.org/resources/multimedia/
One of the significant features of the OPC UA technology is information modeling. The OPC Foundation has partnered with many consortia for the primary purpose of developing an OPC UA companion specification. It models the information from the respective consortia and maps it directly into an OPC UA namespace. This allows the consortia partner members and the OPC Foundation members to take advantage of the rich feature set of the OPC UA technology providing data exchange services from the lowest level devices into the cloud. Consortia partners automatically get the benefits of secure reliable interoperability for their respective information models. For a list of the active collaborations and how you and your company can get involved in these important initiatives check out the OPC Foundation collaborations (https://opcfoundation.org/markets-collaboration/).