The OPC Foundation has elected Microsoft to the Board of Directors of the OPC Foundation, which represents many of the world’s most prominent global suppliers. The new board seat, which will be held by Microsoft Director of IoT Business Development Matt Vasey, is an extension of Microsoft’s support for OPC Foundation since the company first became a member in 1995.
There were two main takeaways from this year’s Hannover Fair: one, the omnipresence of OPC UA on many of the booths; and two, the collaborations signed with many different organizations. It seemed like everywhere you looked at the Hannover Fair, there was and OPC logo. On the collaboration front, the OPC Foundation has been busy solidifying OPC UA as the networking standard for Industrie 4.0 and the Industrial Internet of Things.
The market increasingly demands individualized products. Product life cycles are getting shorter and average lot sizes are getting smaller. Considering this, cost efficient production in a globalized and resource limited environment requires a highly flexible (IT-) infrastructure that also works well in cross-enterprise networks.
In its OPC UA working group, the OPC Foundation concentrates on enhancing the OPC Unified Architecture (UA) standard. Besides the existing Request/Response mechanism, which requires a “standing” connection between an OPC Client (data consumer) and an OPC Server (data provider), OPC UA will be enhanced with an additional communication schema following the principles of Publish-Subscribe.
OPC Classic – or OLE for Process Control – quickly established itself on the market almost 20 years ago. This was, among other things, because the standard provided both users and controller and display system manufacturers’ significant advantages. OPC UA, the technology that replaced it, is available on the market and provides even more utility.
OPC has been in the news recently. OPC Foundation had a booth at the annual embedded world Exhibition & Conference. OPC UA is front and center in the Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) Testbed that was founded as part of the Industrial Internet Consortium. And the ARC Advisory Group discussed the technology in an IIoT article regarding collaboration among automation vendors. Included is a list of upcoming events.
OPC Foundation has been active in events and collaborations in 2015. A six-city North American seminar tour provided technical information on OPC UA. We are presenting OPC UA at members’ user meetings with frequency. Finally, we exhibited at SPS/IPC/Drives where additional collaborations were announced.
The OPC Foundation increases the adoption of OPC UA by collaboration with other trade organizations. “We have signed collaboration agreements with Profibus & Profinet International, ESPG (Powerlink), Sercos International, and m2m-Alliance,” announced Stefan Hoppe at the OPC Foundation press conference at the SPS Show. These organizations use OPC UA as a secure transport channel to reach interoperability to other systems.
Companies join the OPC Foundation for many reasons:
KUKA joined to influence the direction of the technology and contribute to its progress through working groups. Read their reasons in this magazine interview, reproduced on the OPC Foundation website.
Collaboration has been and continues to be the cornerstone of success for the OPC Foundation. Developing solutions for many vertical markets is the vision of the OPC Foundation. When open standards are adopted across verticals, all users benefit. For example, that effort continues today to extend OPC UA beyond industrial automation into new territory like healthcare. And in industrial automation, that goal is furthered by collaboration with associations like CSIA.