Do you Understand OPC?
In an interview with IEN Europe magazine, Stefan Hoppe, Global Vice President OPC Foundation, talks about independent standards for safe industrial communication and the requirements of Industry 4.0.
Editorial
Safe Line Automation with OPC UA
When automating flexible, modular production lines, equipping them with safety technology has traditionally been a costly and time-consuming process. The new Safe Line Automation concept from B&R combines OPC UA and openSAFETY technology to reduce this effort to a minimum.
OPC UA in, OPC UA out: Reduced Effort for Analytics
About 80% of a typical analytics project is spent on non-value-generating tasks. Instead, using OPC UA as an information model significantly reduces these efforts, meaning more time can be spent analyzing data and applying algorithms to ultimately optimize production.
Ease the Transition to IoT Connectivity
Are you ready for a world with 50 billion connected devices? That’s where it’s all headed with the Internet of Things by the year 2020. So how do you connect existing assets to the cloud to gain all of the benefits of the IoT? OPC UA is the key enabler for this transition.
Smaller Footprint, Bigger Impact!
Matrikon’s new FLEX OPC UA SDK does not need great galumphing boots. Why? It is NOT a memory hog or a CPU hog. You can embed this critical functionality in all kinds of devices and use lower-cost microcontrollers.
Welcome
As we get further into 2017 we continue making great strides with OPC technology and marketing activities. Stefan Hoppe and I continue to go out and evangelize the OPC UA technology at a multitude of different events the world over. Just in the months of April and May I have been in five different countries presenting and talking about the limitless applications of OPC UA.
Thank you for taking the time to read this June edition of our OPC Connect newsletter!
There Is No Industrie 4.0 without OPC UA
The Industrie 4.0 Platform published a checklist for classifying and advertising products as Industrie 4.0 “Basic”, “Ready” or “Full”. To comply with the “Industrie 4.0 communication” criterion, even the lowest category requires a product to be addressable over the network via TCP/UDP or IP and to integrate at least the OPC UA information model. As a result, any product being advertised as “Industrie 4.0-enabled” must be OPC UA-capable (either integrated or via a gateway).
The State of Things
Clearly, all the efforts around a reliable and flexible implementation of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and Industrie 4.0 have prompted the research of many different ways to exchange information among industrial systems. And once again, the advantage of the OPC UA design is that – since its inception and for its very nature – it is a specification that can fit more than one scenario and does not constrain innovation but enables it.
Evolution of Pub/Sub and Gateway Software Push IIoT Further
Those who can remember the early days of Internet workings might be familiar with the Publish-Subscribe method of electronic messaging. It is due to the emergence of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) that we have returned to the pub/sub method as a best practice standard for data transmission. IoT gateways provide a bridge between an on-premises communications network and a cloud-based one.
Turning Wonderware System Platform into an OPC UA Server
Have you ever been in a situation where you were working with both Wonderware and some other client (HMI, SCADA, other) and needed to share data? Well, in the practical, real world, having clients from more than one vendor is a reality of existence in the process/control world. Essentially, this article tells you how to turn your Wonderware system into an OPC UA Server.