The OPC Foundation congratulates the Ethernet-APL Project on the announcement of their achievement of a critically important milestone of cross-vendor utilization of their standard. We have joined this initiative because we strongly believe that the combination of OPC UA over APL will be a key technology for decades to come.
Due to the criticality of Industrial Control Systems (ICS) and the desire to make process and business information available to anyone, anywhere, and at any time, the information that is exchanged must meet the security requirements of the site. The OPC UA standards are designed to meet these security requirements while maintaining the level of flexibility and control that site administrators expect.
This whitepaper is intended to provide guidelines and best practices for developing OPC UA based information models. It is not a formal specification, but recommends ways to create OPC UA information models that eventually lead to a better product.
The OPC Foundation will support the development and promotion of an Advanced Physical Layer (APL) for industrial Ethernet, suitable for use in demanding applications and hazardous locations in the process industry.
Three new updates are available on the collaborations front. First, the VDMA and VDW have joined forces to promote the use and dissemination of OPC UA standards under the umati label. Second, the EUROMAP Companion Spec for plastics and rubber machines based on OPC UA is released. Third, an OPC UA Companion Spec for PROFINET is released.
The OPC Foundation, ODVA, and Sercos International are pleased to announce a collaboration to develop a new generation of a best-in-class motion technology for industry: OPC UA Motion. A new Working Group is tasked with specifying the motion facet of Field Level Communications (FLC) to enable inter-vendor operation for motion automation.
This paper explores what OPC UA Certificates are and what they provide, how they are used in OPC UA, and how they fit into the security ‘stack’ of OPC UA. Additionally, it examines OPC UA encryption methodology and the key concepts of a layered security model.
The OPC UA Safety working group has achieved a key milestone publishing Release 1.00 of the specification for the interoperable communication standard for functional safety: OPC UA Safety “Part 15 OPC UA Core Specification”. OPC Foundation members are invited to participate in a co-funding project to develop a software stack.
The OPC Foundation’s vision for facilitating the creation of globally harmonized information models via OPC UA Companion Specifications reaches its first milestone and demonstrates the path forward to true semantic interoperability -as released by the VDMA Machine Vision Initiative.