Each year the membership elects Board Members to serve a two-year term; staggered to elect half of the seats per election. In August a nomination request was sent to the membership for the five (5) seats up for election. Now concluded, we congratulate and welcome the directors, with a look towards working together in the coming years.
In earlier times, OPC learned a hard lesson that tying a spec to a particular wire protocol leads to obsolescence as technologies evolve. This is why OPC UA has a layered architecture, which makes it possible to create mappings for any number of transports like JSON HTTP or UA TCP for Client/Server models and MQTT or UA UDP for Pub/Sub models.
Three years after its launch, the OPC Foundation’s Field Level Communications (FLC) initiative has completed the OPC UA FX (Field eXchange) specifications. In addition, a multi-vendor demo with controllers and network infrastructure components from 20 companies has been realized.
We accomplished two major releases of the Conformance Test Tool (CTT) this year, and updated the interoperability (IOP) infrastructure to better support hybrid IOP events. In 2022 our goals are to automate more testing and add test-cases for PubSub, OPC UA FX, AliasNames, and much more.
On November 23, 2021 the Clean Energy and Smart Manufacturing Innovation Institute (CESMII) and the OPC Foundation launched the UA Cloud Library as an open-source reference implementation and Docker container for self-hosting, thereby reducing machine-to-cloud connection efforts.
First, the VDMA has founded a new centralized department focusing on OPC UA interface development as the basis for its umati initiative. Second, the latest addition to the OPC UA for Machinery Specification standardizes the status of all machines -harmonizing a previously heterogeneous set of solutions.
Beckhoff has directly integrated OPC UA Pub/Sub communication into the TwinCAT 3 runtime. This paves the way for straightforward implementation of machine-to-machine (M2M) and device-to-cloud (D2C) scenarios based on the OPC UA Pub/Sub specification. Also, watch the on-demand webinar demonstrating usability of OPC UA in various Beckhoff tools.
One of the hottest new trends in OPC UA is Pub/Sub (Publisher/Subscriber) technology. On November 16, 2021, the Finnish Society of Automation (FSA) hosted the OPC Day Finland 2021. Watch the recording here. Then, learn how to connect to Azure or AWS IoT Core using OPC UA Pub/Sub.
Based on communication via OPC UA, OMRON has participated in the interconnection trial of the European integrated data infrastructure project “GAIA-X”. A shared data space is planned between Europe (the Netherlands) and Japan.
Discover what are the Advantech OPC UA applications and offerings in this video. We talk about OPC-UA as an accelerator for Industry 4.0 and the Industrial Internet of Things. By the end of this video led by Advantech and the OPC Foundation, you’ll have a better idea of what OPC-UA is, and how it differs from the plethora of protocols that plague our industry.