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President’s Welcome

    Collaborations

    The number of industries interested in utilizing the OPC UA technology for their own initiatives and to accomplish their vertical-specific goals is growing rapidly.

    Pharmaceutical

    The OPC Foundation has been actively participating in the pharmaceutical industry with the OPEN-SCS initiative. This is a significant opportunity focused on serialization in the pharmaceutical industry and ultimately will have applications in other vertical industries. It’s interesting how the significance of packaging and the cooperation we have with the OMAC PackML standard is so important to the pharmaceutical industry. The many suppliers participating in this effort will result in a series of specifications and guidelines with OPC UA being the key infrastructure to solve the fundamental issue of serialization. This initiative is being driven by the pharmaceutical companies and regulatory agencies on a worldwide scope. See OPEN-SCS for more details and how to get involved.

    Oil & Gas

    The OPC Foundation continues to be actively working in many industries inclusive of oil and gas with active participation in the Open Process Automation Forum. For more detailed information and how you can get involved in this initiative check out OpenProcessAutomation.   These guys are working with the oil companies, suppliers, and many other standards organizations to develop a complete process control solution based on open standards. It will be a completely open system with a revolutionary architecture that at the same time brings forward the existing installed base. I highly encourage your company to be actively engaged in this initiative as it is driving the future of this industry.

    IIoT

    The world of IIoT is also providing new opportunities as we now have the ability to integrate disparate devices and applications seamlessly. The volume of IIoT devices and appliances that are starting to roll out and the challenges of accessing data from these devices are staggering. Ultimately it’s going to create even more opportunities for information modelling and analytical software to convert the volumes of data into useful information. Enterprise applications and cloud software that speak OPC UA have a head start in this race.

    VDMA

    One of the most significant collaborations and joint working groups that the OPC Foundation is doing is our very special partnership with VDMA. As the VDMA has many individual facets, this work will result in a multitude of companion specifications. At OPC Day Europe it presented, for the first time, the OPC UA based standardization for Robotics and Machine Vision.

    Technology

    Many exciting things have happened including the release of the OPC UA Publish/Subscribe (Pub/Sub) specification. The addition of the Pub/Sub paradigm extends the use cases for the OPC UA technology into other markets. OPC UA with Pub/Sub enables further adoption of OPC UA at the deepest levels of the shop-floor where controllers, sensors, and embedded devices typically require optimized, low power, and low-latency communications on local networks. Pub/Sub enables the use of OPC UA directly over the Internet (WANs) by utilizing popular data transports like MQTT and AMQP while retaining its key OPC UA end-to-end security and standardized data modeling advantages. Similarly, Pub/Sub also enables use of the UDP and TSN for establishing low-latency, loss tolerating connections on LANs.

    Upcoming Events

    There are many significant events that are going on throughout the balance of this year, many of these officially choreographed and coordinated by the OPC Foundation. In July 2018, the OPC Foundation will be touring Asia with four special local Asia OPC Days.  These free seminars offer the unique opportunity to learn and see OPC UA in action in a city near you. Registration for these prestigious local events may be found at the following links:

    Participation

    In addition to OPC Connect, the OPC Foundation publishes a monthly update newsletter. Register on the OPC Foundation website and become a recipient of this newsletter.

    Thanks again for taking time out from your busy day to read this edition of the OPC Connect newsletter.

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