OPC Foundation & CESMII: Release of UA Cloud Library
On November 23, 2021 the Clean Energy and Smart Manufacturing Innovation Institute (CESMII) and the OPC Foundation launched the UA Cloud Library as an open-source reference implementation and Docker container for self-hosting. For Industrial IoT applications, the UA Cloud Library decouples the connectivity work from the setup of the analytics software by making the semantics of a machine (the OPC UA information model) available up front, allowing these two tasks to be completed in parallel. It also drives semantic interoperability through reuse of existing OPC UA information models available in the Library. Finally, simulations to verify new UA information models can be built leveraging the UA Cloud Library before the industrial asset is even built. The OPC Foundation is also hosting a global instance of the UA Cloud Library and the existing standardized information models (“Companion Specifications”) have already been uploaded. The UA Cloud Library has an OpenAPI-compliant REST interface and several open-source clients have already been implemented to simplify integration.
“The UA Cloud Library fills the missing gap of making OPC UA information models available in the cloud at a global scale, without requiring a connection to the physical machines”, said Erich Barnstedt, Chief Architect Standards & Consortia, Microsoft Corporation and OPC Foundation UA Cloud Library working group chairman. “It enables lookup of information models – sometimes referred to as industrial digital twins – to match them to time-series data available from cloud-based analytics software, which is a common ask in Industrial IoT projects.”