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OPC News of IIoT, Industrie 4.0, New Materials

    OPC Foundation has news of OPC UA’s role in Industrie 4.0 and the Industrial Internet of Things.   And announces a new OPC UA brochure, new videos, and provides news from CERN on OPC UA in the Large Hadron Collider.

    OPC UA, the Infrastructure for Internet of Things, Industrial Internet of Things, Industrie 4.0

    OPC Foundation board members, technology advisor council members, and OPC technology working group members have been participating in the Internet of Things and Industrie 4.0 initiatives very pro-actively.  We’ve seen renewed commitment from all the major automation players providing OPC UA based products from embedded all the way through the enterprise.  OPC UA has been selected as the communication platform because of its rich service-oriented architecture and information modeling capability.  The OPC Foundation recently kicked off a sub working group of the OPC Unified Architecture working group to expand platform to include publish-subscribe and support for the TSN (times sensitive network) which enhances the OPC Unified Architecture components to leverage high speed open Ethernet and truly enabling deterministic real time support for the OPC UA aware applications.   This enhancement to the OPC UA base will provide the communication solution for horizontal and vertical communication between devices and applications from multitudes of vendors and industrial Ethernet organizations truly allowing plug and play interoperability in ways end uses only dreamed of.  The first kickoff meeting had 46 people from multitudes of companies on an international basis to contribute to making this initiative a reality in record time.  –Tom Burke

    OPC UA Brochure (feature)Brochure

    Featuring explanations of OPC UA details, comments from members, and applications, this 44-page brochure is an excellent starting point for understanding OPC UA: “OPC Unified Architecture, Interoperability for Industrie 4.0 and the Internet of Things.”

    Videos

    The Foundation has created a one –and-a-half minute video to introduce OPC UA:

    Visit the OPC Foundation YouTube Channel for other videos.

    OPC UA in the Large Hadron Collider

    THE EUROPEAN ORGANIZATION FOR NUCLEAR RESEARCH (CERN) will restart its Large Hadron Collider LHC after a renovation break of over two years. The 27-km particle accelerator will smash protons together at a speed that is close to the speed of light. The Detector Control System (DCS), part of the LHS, uses more than 5000 CANopen nodes. They are connected to multiple networks, which are integrated into a Scada system. The link between the Scada layer and CANopen is realized by means of OPC UA.

    CERNThe CANopen nodes are called ELMB (embedded local monitoring boards). The researchers use CAN interface boards from Kvaser (Sweden) and National Instruments (US) to connect the CANopen network segments to the central controller. The configurations of the OPC CANopen servers by Unified Automation (Germany) are stored in XML files.