OpSIT is a project supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research whose goal is to support the health sector with the optimized application of Smart Item Technologies, using the example of patient care. The choice to use the industrial-oriented protocol OPC UA came from its flexibility and near real-time capability to transport the encrypted delivery intake report to the care cloud gateway server (OPC UA Historian Server).
Varroc group (Varroc), a global auto component manufacturer was looking for a comprehensive solution to leverage their Industry 4.0 initiatives across their plants. This involved connecting a multitude of machines, systems, and sensors which were on heterogeneous control systems, communicating on different protocols to a single data tunnel through OPC.
Welcome to the September 2016 edition of the OPC Connect newsletter! Our September edition of the newsletter features numerous exciting announcements from our sponsors, the OPC community and the OPC Foundation itself. There are many sensational things that have happened since the June edition of our newsletter, and a set of even more exciting things to happen through the balance of this year!
We’ve heard plenty of talk for the past year or two about the Industrial IoT (Internet of Things). Amidst all the conversation and occasional hype about the Industrial IoT, there has been cautious but steadily increasing implementation. This experience suggests that an evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, approach to the IIoT makes the most sense.
Welcome to the June 2016 edition of the OPC Connect newsletter! This edition of the newsletter features many exciting announcements from our sponsors, the OPC community and the OPC Foundation itself. Many significant things have happened since the March edition of our newsletter from a marketing, technical and organizational perspective.
Microsoft has taken the initiative to port the existing OPC UA C# Stack to the Windows 10 Universal Core. And along with the OPC Foundation, have worked closely together over the last number of months to deeply integrate OPC UA into the Azure IoT Suite. OPC UA is an essential component of the connected products that manufacturing customers need today, and it is increasingly seen as an important part of enterprise IoT scenarios and business models. In keeping with their commitment to openness and collaboration, Microsoft is fully committed to supporting OPC UA and its evolution.
In the past, Lenze used to rely on the OPC Classic to enable access to device data. However, as this standard no longer covers advanced requirements, the company opted for the development of an OPC UA Server. This was achieved using a Toolkit from Softing. Also, Softing’s new white paper discusses OPC UA Publisher / Subscriber communication for IIoT and outlines details on a proof-of-concept implementation.
It’s no secret down on the shop floor, or in the upper echelons of management, that IT and OT don’t always see eye to eye. For decades, the business computing world of Information Technology (IT) has been growing and evolving separately from the Operational Technology (OT) world. Be that as it may, these two worlds are now poised to make contact. Businesses are waking up to the value of the data that’s coming from production systems.
Welcome to the March 2016 edition of the OPC Foundation OPC Connect newsletter. 2016 has already started with a multitude of opportunities for the Foundation; its members, and the whole OPC community. Interoperability through collaboration continues to be the key objective of the end-user community in industrial automation.
What’s the buzz with IIOT, Industrie 4.0, IoT, and M2M? Is it real or is it just marketing hype?
There are many buzzwords, three letter acronyms (TLA) and proliferation of phrases that attempt to define and communicate all this terminology that some people are summing up as the Internet of Everything. What we know is that all of these buzzwords and acronyms seemingly all have one thing in common, they are all fundamentally founded assuming Ethernet-based technology.
The month of September through November for the OPC Foundation is always a very, very busy time of year. The end of September is the beginning of the North American seminar tour, and the OPC Foundation Booth at PackExpo in Las Vegas. The SPS/IPC/Drives show in Nuremberg, Germany takes place in November. There are also regional events in Finland and Belgium this year. I highly encourage you to take time out from your busy schedule and visit OPC at one of these numerous venues, and learn where OPC is going.
While IoT standards and interoperability are likely to be subjects of ongoing debate and discussion over the next few years, there are already well-established standards in industrial and manufacturing environments that can accelerate the shift to outcome-based models. In fact, OPC Unified Architecture is a platform independent service oriented architecture that provides standard models for secure and reliable information exchange in industrial automation across a range of manufacturing and resource industries.
One vision of Industry 4.0 is of a highly automated, harmonious production line that relies on minimal human intervention. This goal requires seamless communication between different machines, networks and applications. Luckily for industry, that’s where the OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA) protocol comes into play.