Ethernet APL
We have been actively working on certification of OPC UA products that connect over Ethernet APL. Some of you might ask, “What is Ethernet Advanced Physical Layer (APL)?” It is the IEC 2-WISE // IEEE 802.3cg-2019 standard for 10BASE-T1L Ethernet that describes how to provide standard network communication (as well as power) in an industrial environment –namely hazardous Zones and Divs. Any protocol can be supported by Ethernet APL and it outperforms the other industrial 2-wire protocols. The OPC Foundation has joined with other industry groups to ensure that this innovative new technology can be used to deploy certified OPC UA devices. We have also been preparing ourselves to ensure that devices supporting this hardware can be connected to the test environments in our certification labs.
Time Sensitive Networking
We have continued our involvement with Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) certification. This includes active work with the FLC certification requirements group. This group is defining the TSN requirements for the Field eXchange specification and for TSN in OPC UA. Unlike a standard OPC UA Client/Server product or PubSub product, a product that supports TSN communication requires the addition of specific network hardware as well as configuration in order to certify the product. As a result, our certification can no longer simply focus on the application and adapting the configuration of the test network will in the future become a common lab activity. With this in mind we are updating our certification test lab requirements and working on the first configurations to provide guidance for the labs and vendors.
Conformance Test Tool (CTT)
The next release of the CTT is scheduled for September (Q3) 2021 and it will include Alarm & Condition enhancements as well as many new features like AliasNames, integrated information model testing, and others.
If you have questions on these topics or are interested in getting involved in our activities,please do not hesitate to contact us at: compliance[AT]opcfoundation.org