Leading Healthcare Providers Use OPC UA
Softing Industrial has signed an agreement with the OPC Foundation to supply the OPC’s Open-SCS working group with Softing’s OPC UA toolkits and to offer technical consultancy to the group.
Softing Industrial has signed an agreement with the OPC Foundation to supply the OPC’s Open-SCS working group with Softing’s OPC UA toolkits and to offer technical consultancy to the group.
The OPC Foundation is working tirelessly to advance collaboration with a variety of organizations. Featured here are collaborations with: PackML, PRODML, MDIS, and AutomationML.
The needs of industry have been the driving force behind the new OPC UA Publish/Subscribe (PubSub) Specification. This specification layers OPC UA on top of message based middleware (AMQP, MQTT, XMPP, etc.) allowing users to take advantage of OPC UA features such as the robust information modelling framework while adapting to message-centered communication paradigms.
In this paper, we present a complete IoT (Internet of Things) system, starting from a network of smart sensors and actuators. To ensure interoperability and a high level of standardization, a customized but compatible OPC UA industrial middleware implementation, named OPC UA / ROSA, allows secured communications. It also acts as a distributed contextual services discovery mechanism.
During Hannover Fair, the BSI (German Federal Office for Security in information Technology) published their results of an OPC UA security analysis with respect to its relevance in the German Industrie 4.0 initiative. The results are publicized on the BSI and on the OPC Foundation websites. A statement from the BSI reads: “An extensive analysis of the security functions in the specification of OPC UA confirmed that OPC UA was designed with a focus on security and does not contain systematic security vulnerabilities.”
While OPC UA today is mostly recognized for its communication virtues (regarding scalability, security, performance, platform-independence), one of its most exciting features remains in the shadows. Information modeling, or the ability to express not only data but also the meaning of data, is a key concept in the quest to make systems more intelligent, more autonomous and more evolvable. While the full potential of information modeling in industrial applications remains to be demonstrated by academic research, many of its core ideas can be applied right now.
The OPC Foundation opens the doors to facilitate increased adoption of OPC Unified Architecture technology beyond industrial automation! The OPC Foundation is implementing an “open shared source” strategy…
by Philippe Maurin, Gustavo Ferraz, Eduardo Freitas, RD&I, ORTENG Equipamentos e Sistemas.
ORTENG is supplying the electrical and automation systems of 29 substations with 1,431 IEDs for oil refinery Abreu e Lima of Petrobras, which is being built at Ipojuca, Brazil. Each substation has at least one SISORT DA system working in a redundant configuration with a total of 44 systems and a total of 80,000 OPC items. Each system has an OPC Server (SISORT-OPC Server) connected to at least two (and up to six) OPC Clients, including DCS OPC Clients and Event Recorder OPC Clients.
by Georg Suess, Operational Marketing, and Vaclav Bouse, Product Manager, Softing Industrial Automation GmbH
With the industry-wide trend towards horizontal and vertical integration, intelligence is moving from supervisory control systems to local components. This development is leading to a growing need for communication for which the open OPC UA standard provides an ideal solution because it can also be used for embedded devices.
by Frans van Dorsselaer, Fox-IT
OPC UA is gaining ground. The attendance at the Interoperability Workshop in Nürnberg last month was higher than ever. The product variety is also increasing; we recognized controlling devices, gateways to legacy and proprietary protocols, operational HMIs, historians, and back office…