President’s Welcome – March 2023

OPC UA meets IT addressing REST, DataSpaces and the Metaverse

OPC UA for REST

OPC UA began as an initiative in the OT world, scaling from PLC controller level to ERP. With the support of the PubSub mechanism, we extended down to the field level and reached into cloud systems. Assets can now push their information directly or via gateway to dashboards from cloud giants like AWS and Microsoft Azure.

Now, we are expanding our reach even further. The IT world desires to utilize data from the OT space to be combined with additional concepts like AAS (Asset Administration Shell), Data Spaces, Digital Twins, and the Metaverse. In most cases, they exchange data via proprietary or standardized HTTP REST interfaces. We are pleased to announce that the kick-off meeting for this new initiative was held on March 28th, 2023, with over 45 participants from across the world. Congratulations to Erich Barnstedt, Microsoft, for being elected as Chairperson of the group. Read more details here.

OPC UA for Metaverse

We are excited to announce that during the upcoming Hannover Messe on April 17th-21st, 2023, the OPC Foundation will be doing live demos with Digital Twin and the Metaverse. The OPC Foundation’s Board of Directors (BoD) decided in October 2022 to start a working group “OPC UA for Metaverse,” and all major BoD companies have joined this group!  Find details here.

Do not forget the information about OPC UA technology, the field and cloud initiative, and the 85+ domain information models – but also the solutions from 14 sponsoring partners being available for consulting at their partner pods!

OPC UA Meets IT: chatGPT to Reduce Engineering Time?

REST, DataSpaces, Metaverse… more thrilling news? We still have one: On Thursday, April 20th, 2023, we will host a 2-hour conference with incredible topics, including an outlook on the potential of how OPC UA information models can be easily derived from WoT Thing Descriptions generated automatically by ChatGPT. Find details here.

Member news: Crossing the 900 Threshold

More thrilling news? We still have one: The OPC Foundation is proud to welcome Procter & Gamble as the 900th OPC Foundation member. A leading consumer goods company, P&G is also a global leader in the Smart Manufacturing domain through its efforts to drive innovation by using digital technologies, including OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA), in a concept they call “constructive disruption.”  P&G is a very special company with tremendous global relevance and high visibility in all of our daily lives. As a major producer behind an incredible number of name-brand products, we likely use their products in our daily lives. Every morning when you look in the mirror in your bathroom using their products you can think OPC UA was somehow involved – and see me smiling.

Field Level Initiative

In addition to cloud applications, we have continued our efforts in our field-level communication initiative. Read the article from Peter Lutz here.

Certification

I like to thank Thomas, an employee from Schneider-Electric, hearing from a vendor that has been through the Certification process. Learning from what they experienced, the benefits they received from the certification, and general feedback.
Read the report here

Collaboration

As the OPC UA technology is growing into new areas, the OPC Foundation is continuously signing new partnerships with key associations active in that area. On Feb 6th, 2023, we signed a Liaison Agreement with the Digital Twin Consortium (DTC) – see more details here.

New Joint Working Groups (JWG)

We have started three new joint working groups:

• Feb 14^th: Kick-Off Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) Working Group (details here)
• March 7^th : Kick-Off OPAF & OPCF-FLC Joint Initiative (details here)
• March 23^rd : Kick-Off extended FDT working group (details here)

Events

Since our last newsletter edition, we have attended many events, including the ARC Forum (in Orlando, US), embedded world (Nuremberg, Germany), Smart Factory Expo (Seoul, Korea), and Global Industry (Lyon, France). We showcased the Field Level Communication’s C2C demonstrator and the Cloud demonstrator, including 22 assets pushing data via OPC UA over MQTT to the cloud dashboard.

Success story: OPC UA in Renewable Energy Assets

I assume you enjoyed the Rosendahl-Nextron success story in our last issue. Nobody else than their CEO Siegfried Altmann personally highlighted the benefits of OPC UA during an event organized by Austria Industrie4.0 Plattform including me as speaker. Special thanks to Siegfried Altmann – strong signal from a CEO to promote our standard.

The latest success story highlights Scatec success with OPC UA in over 40 renewable energy assets. Learn why solar plants generate more than 100.000 data points per second from our first Norway member company Prediktor being heavily involved in this project. We all should be proud how Scatec improves the future with all their super large photovoltaic plants in the world like Benban Solar Park in Egypt including OPC UA technology. Read their success story here.

Overall: Do you understand why I am thrilled? What about you?

See you in Hannover in person!

Stefan Hoppe
President, OPC Foundation
stefan.hoppe[AT]opcfoundation.org