The OPC UA for IEC 61850 Companion Specification was created to support the integration of electrical aspects into an industrial plant. It defines an OPC UA Information Model to represent electrical substation automation systems. The focus is on data exchange between a gateway and the devices that control electrical networks.
The OPC Foundation has partnered with many consortia for the primary purpose of developing an OPC UA companion specification. This allows the consortia partner members and the OPC Foundation members to take advantage of the rich feature set of the OPC UA technology providing data exchange services from the lowest level devices into the cloud.
The OPC Foundation conducts and attends numerous events throughout the year that showcase OPC technology and its member’s solutions. These include trade shows, conferences, technology training, interoperability events, and attendance at select member functions.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a vision of a world where billions of smart devices collaborate with each other across the Internet. Fortunately, OPC UA has an end-to-end security solution that ensures privacy and integrity of data sent via a broker (like AMQP or MQTT).
End-users in manufacturing, oil & gas, energy, and building automation are all in the early stages of deploying OPC UA. But still many companies struggle to understand the business benefits and to justify the investment of transforming their current technology infrastructure to OPC UA. Here’s a 5-step guide.
The OPC standards have made a significant impact to industrial software interoperability over the last 23 years, and the adoption of OPC UA continues to accelerate. To address these growing needs, the latest version of Software Toolbox’s OPC Data Client development toolkit for OPC clients focuses on the productivity and application time to market for any active developer of custom OPC Client software applications.
The Softing gateway dataFEED uaGate MB is commercially available now. The new product enables the straightforward and secure integration of process- and machine data coming from Modbus PLCs with IoT- and Industry 4.0 solutions.
Since it has been approved for Industrie 4.0, OPC UA has emerged as the protocol of choice for on-premise industrial data, and it seems a logical choice for many IIoT applications as well. Cogent uses their DataHub Transfer Protocol to tunnel it between off-premise endpoints.
The modeling capabilities in OPC UA are rated the most valuable feature of the OPC Unified Architecture Standard. Unified Automation offers extended modeling services to their customers and has contracted the reputable OPC UA expert Dr. Wolfgang Mahnke.
Welcome to the first edition of the OPC Connect newsletter in 2018. After taking a brief hiatus from this column I am back to tell you about all the exciting things the OPC Foundation is looking forward to this year. 2018 promises to be a very interesting year for the OPC technology, the overall OPC membership, and the community-at-large. Thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to read this edition of the OPC Connect newsletter.