Here we report about various activities in different regions of the world, this time from OPC Community Days in Finland, France and Norway:
OPC DAY Norway 2024 by Tom Kristian Venger, NFEA
For the third time in history, the OPC DAY Norway was held on the 20th of November at Gardermoen, Oslo. The event was hosted by the Norwegian Society of Electric and Automatic Control, NFEA.
This year’s event gathered 78 participants from a long range of companies, including Equinor, Aker BP, Elkem, Avinor, Kongsberg Maritime, National Oilwell Varco, Gassco and Siemens Energy – just to mention a few.
A big thank you to OPC Foundation for all their kind support for this year’s OPC DAY Norway, and a special thank you to Stefan Hoppe for his Keynote presentation on the Cloud initiative.
We have a close and good cooperation with Jouni Aro and OPC DAY Finland in the planning of our respective events. This year we had the privilege of having Jouni Aro as a speaker as well, with a presentation about Information Models in Brownfield Installations.
We also worked together to get Dr. Eugene D. Tung, Executive Director at Merck & Co, as a speaker both in Finland and Norway. He talked about OPC UA/MTP Use Cases from the Pharmaceutical Industry. In total, we had the privilege of hearing eight different speakers with interesting topics on a great variety of themes. We heard about UA for Carbon Capture and OPC UA for energy, as well as OPC UA in maritime automation systems and OPC UA in Space.
We would also like to thank the five companies who had exhibitions at this year’s event: AFRY Consult AS, Beckhoff Automation AS, Phoenix Contact AS, Emerson Automation Solutions AS, and TGS Prediktor AS.
The last slide shown by Espen Krogh from TGS Prediktor AS at the OPC Day Norway 2024.
20th OPC Day Finland by Jouni Aro, ProSys OPC
The 20th OPC Day Finland was arranged by the Finnish Society of Automation and hosted by Microsoft Finland at Espoo on November 21. There were six invited speakers and seven sponsored talks on a wide variety of topics.
Nearly 80 people registered to listen to Erich Barnstedt introducing the Cloud Initiative and how Microsoft is supporting it. Zynn Webster talked about the huge efficiency improvements they have made at Danone by streamlining their operations and how OPC UA helps them in standardizing their factory communications, worldwide. Eugene Tung from Merck & Co. introduced Module Type Package (MTP), which is based on OPC UA, which is receiving a lot of interest within the pharmaceutical industry. Mohit Agarwal gave a demonstration on how the OPC UA IJT information model works with tightening tools provided by Atlas Copco. Matthias Damm, from Unified Automation, provided highlights from the last 20 years of OPC UA standardization, which was started by the same key personnel that still maintain it through weekly meetings. Matthias also shared the latest success story of OPC UA in Space.
For the rest of the busy day, the Finnish community presented more success stories on how OPC UA has ensured connectivity from the field to the cloud for several years now. The event was made possible by the sponsors, AWS, Beckhoff, Brightly Works, Microsoft, Novotek, Prosys OPC, Unified Automation, Valmet and Wapice. We are very delighted to have their continued support and interest since this event successfully started international OPC events back in 2005.
Since that day, we have continued to have a lot of interesting discussions. The recordings and presentations can be accessed at https://www.automaatioseura.fi/sas/jaostot/opc/tapahtumat/opc-day-finland-2024/
Speakers from OPC Day Finland
OPC Day France hosted by Renault Group, by Patrick Lamboley, Schneider-Electric & Chair OPC France
The 26th of November OPC France with the support of GIMELEC, organized our annual OPC Day hosted by Renault Group in the ReFactory located in Flins. There was 13 invited speakers and 13 sponsored talks on several topics focusing on industrial feedback and success stories.
124 participated to this OPC Day people to listen and discover the feedback from Renault Groupe after their implementation of OPC UA in their factories. Eric Marchiol, VP Metaverse Industry & Quality for Renault Group, started this day with an introduction to the industrial metaverse for Renault Group.
During a complete overview Renault Group represented by Thierry Daneau, Jean-François Desrousseaux, Laurent Cortat, Oscar Aguilar Charro and Redouane Rihani shared feedback on the implementation of OPC UA in industrial devices in their plan with 15000 connected devices, 60.000 messages per second, 2.000.000 data points and associated structured data model based on unique dictionary. This presentation was structured around benefits and limitation intensified in at scale deployment.
During this day, time was also allocated for people to exchange with our sponsors (Agileo, Baumer, Rexroth, Capgemini, ifm, Murr Elektronik, Pepperl+Fuchs, Prosyst, Schneider Electric, Sick, Siemens, Systerel and Turck) and Renault Group provide the opportunity to share their Control Room where worldwide data are displaying and analyzing by experts.
Second feedback was also done during the afternoon related to implementation of OPC UA in l’Oréal factories by Antoine Masset from L’Oréal and Eric Oursel from Capgemini Engineering. The journey was closed with Didier Giarratano from Schneider Electric. Introducing a new European regulation under definition the Cyber Resilient Act which will impact the product design.
We will continue in 2026 to share feedback and success stories from End users of OPC UA !
Speakers from OPC Day France hosted by Renault Group in the ReFactory located in Flins
