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…
by Robert Trask, P.E
As U.S. manufacturing and production moves toward what is generally considered the fourth Industrial Revolution, popularized as “Industry 4.0,” many of the necessary technological components are already in place. However, there is some additional ground that must be covered. A consensus is forming around the notion that the primary component preventing the revolution from reaching full speed is wider acceptance of communication standards. So how can we consistently, and with less effort, exchange data between the various components of a highly connected industrial machine or process?
by Nathan Pocock, Director of Technology and Compliance, OPC Foundation
It seems as though everyone has now heard of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Industry 4.0 and the opportunities ahead. But are you prepared to benefit from this next technological leap while maximizing your opportunity with minimal risk and cost? One key to success is adopting open standards such as OPC UA, a platform-independent technology that assures interoperability…
by Dan Hebert, Control magazine
OPC is playing a significant role in allowing plants to bridge the gap between process control and building automation systems, according to an article in the November issue of Control magazine by senior technical editor Dan Hebert. There are multiple reasons to bring them together, and others to keep them apart.
Security and interoperability for data and communication are key topics for the Industry 4.0 initiative and the Internet of Things. An efficient network of sensors, field devices and controllers up to the Cloud for new services and Big Data can be realized with the OPC-Unified Architecture (OPC UA). That was the message delivered at the OPC Foundation press conference during November’s SPS/IPC/Drives 2014 in Nuremberg, Germany.
by Tesla
Tablet PCs are playing a growing role in helping workers monitor industrial processes as they move around a factory. Smart watches may soon prove equally useful.
To showcase the application potential of smart watches, Tesla, a company that enables real-time mobile SCADA access to industrial communications platforms using OPC UA technology and the Android operating system, recently participated in a…
by Frank Schubert, Vice Chairman of the Working Group Technique; Member of the BACnet Interest Group Europe Advisory Board
The OPC Foundation and BACnet Interest Group Europe founded a common working group to specify a mapping profile between BACnet and OPC UA. This article introduces the basics to understand the mapping between these two technologies.
In the working group the members identified the most commonly expected use-cases. The first approach included in the current documents is a mapping of building automation data from BACnet devices and represent them through a mapping device in OPC UA.
by Erik Dellinger, Kepware Technologies
Before I get into Kepware’s current implementation of the BACnet Calendar and Schedule Objects (available in KEPServerEX version 5.15 and later), we should cover objects in general terms. When we talk about objects, we are essentially talking about structured data. You can think of structured data as how we store and organize data so that it can be easily and efficiently referenced and used. For example, rather than reading your first name, your last name, and then your location, you read it all at once. Structured data is a collection of properties or attributes that can contain various information, some of which is useless on its own but paints a larger and…
By Melissa Topp, ICONICS
A small, covert team of engineers at Microsoft cast aside suggestions that the company spend US$60 million to turn its 500-acre headquarters into a smart campus to achieve energy savings and other efficiency gains. Instead, applying an “Internet of Things meets Big Data” approach, the team invented a data-driven software solution based upon ICONICS HMI/SCADA software that is slashing the cost of operating the campus’ 125 buildings, saving Microsoft millions of dollars. ICONICS’ certified OPC UA and BACnet connectivity played a key role in making these savings possible.
Microsoft’s Energy-Smart Buildings application includes over two million data points generating half a billion data transactions every day. Over five hundred OPC-enabled Modbus devices, including electric meters, power distribution units, generators, UPS switches and other critical building equipment, generate large amounts of Big Data that are being provided to…
By Stefan Hoppe, TwinCAT Product Manager, BECKHOFF Automation; President of the OPC Foundation Europe
Energy monitoring in decentralized real estate properties enables operators to establish energetically optimized statutory management requirements. As an example, the municipal sector often operates up to 2,000 real estate properties via facility management. The energy monitoring system, e2watch® from regio iT Corporation for Information Technology has been developed in cooperation with the real estate and facility management department of the city of Aachen, Germany.
The e2watch® system utilizes a compact Beckhoff controller as a decentralized control unit for data acquisition and buffering. However, the most sophisticated feature is the synchronization with the Cloud using a configurable scheduler. This system uses the manufacturer-independent interoperability standard, OPC-UA (also known as international standard IEC 62541) with integrated security mechanisms as a data transport layer. The collected data gets pushed from a control unit (acting as a PLCopen function block standardized OPC-UA Client) as historical data…