Check out the latest product releases from our members:
● National Instruments LabVIEW : enabling OPC communications in LabVIEW-based systems
● Kepware Technologies and Splunk alliance : accelerating new insights from industrial data
● Kepware Technologies KEPServerEX update : improving big data analytics
● Kepware Technologies local historian plug-in : improving operating efficiency
Industry trends such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and Industry 4.0 are fueled by advanced distributed systems that not only feature the latest technologies… Read More »Enabling OPC communications in LabVIEW-based systems
Software development company Kepware Technologies has released version 5.16 of its flagship product, KEPServerEX. The release, which expands Kepware’s offerings for the power, manufacturing and… Read More »KEPServerEX update improves big data analytics
Kepware Technologies’ Local Historian Plug-In for KEPServerEX is a flexible, easy to use and cost-effective solution that provides trending, reporting, and analytics tools with access to historical… Read More »Kepware local historian plug-in improves operating efficiency
Splunk Inc. (NASDAQ: SPLK), provider of the leading software platform for real-time operational intelligence, and Kepware Technologies, developer of software solutions for industrial automation and… Read More »Splunk, Kepware alliance accelerates new insights from industrial data
By Tom Burke, President and Executive Director of the OPC Foundation
This edition of the OPC Connect newsletter focuses on OPC engagement with building automation.
Since October 2012, we have had an active working group and collaboration between BACnet Interest Group Europe and the OPC Foundation. The fruits of the labor of this working group are about to be released as a companion specification at the end of this year.
This issue begins to highlight some of the success stories that we already have from our OPC vendors deploying products that solve critical integration opportunities between industrial automation and building automation.
by Frank Schubert, Vice Chairman of the Working Group Technique; Member of the BACnet Interest Group Europe Advisory Board
The OPC Foundation and BACnet Interest Group Europe founded a common working group to specify a mapping profile between BACnet and OPC UA. This article introduces the basics to understand the mapping between these two technologies.
In the working group the members identified the most commonly expected use-cases. The first approach included in the current documents is a mapping of building automation data from BACnet devices and represent them through a mapping device in OPC UA.
By Nathan Pocock, Director of Compliance
In our last newsletter we reported a high number of test failures. Products are generally passing Compliance, Interoperability, and Usability on first attempt; application crashes and resource leaks continue to be the cause of most failures. In response, we released Certification Resource Efficiency Testing to provide step-by-step guidance on how to conduct high quality robustness, recovery, and stress testing within your own lab environment.
Certified OPC products are ideal for production use because they have been tested by the OPC Foundation Certification Test Lab for compliance, interoperability, usability, but most importantly: robust error handling and recovery that will provide years of reliable operations, greatly reducing the costly risks of unavailability and/or shutdown.
By Richard Clark, InduSoft
The University of Texas at Austin campus is large — something on the order of a small city. The campus has every type of physical environment imaginable. From Opera Halls to Football Stadiums. From Foreign Language Classrooms to Research Laboratories. From Restaurants to Hospitals and Medical Training Facilities. Now imagine having to provide for all that, steam for electricity and heating, chilled water for cooling, emergency power, deionized water and pressurized air for an area of buildings, offices and classrooms covering an area of 17 million square feet.
In an interview with Juan Ontiveros, Executive Director, “We had a manual process for taking meter readings. The infrastructure was built using PLCs and smart electric meters and networking them around Campus. Data gathering from these devices began in 2006 originally using OPC DA technology and a process historian that the Department already owned. MS Excel was used to run energy reports off the historian. It was a very expensive time-consuming and labor intensive process, taking sometimes weeks to produce a bill for just one of the buildings.”
by Erik Dellinger, Kepware Technologies
Before I get into Kepware’s current implementation of the BACnet Calendar and Schedule Objects (available in KEPServerEX version 5.15 and later), we should cover objects in general terms. When we talk about objects, we are essentially talking about structured data. You can think of structured data as how we store and organize data so that it can be easily and efficiently referenced and used. For example, rather than reading your first name, your last name, and then your location, you read it all at once. Structured data is a collection of properties or attributes that can contain various information, some of which is useless on its own but paints a larger and…