Cloud computing has become increasingly popular in various industries in recent years due to its scalability, cost-effectiveness, and flexibility. However, migrating legacy systems to the cloud can be challenging, especially when dealing with different service providers and their proprietary interfaces. One solution to this problem is using OPC UA as a cloud-neutral communication protocol.
Product news from Matrikon this month include: Modbus Adapter for Matrikon Data Broker (Modbus MDBA) with OPC UA; Updates to Windows DCOM; and OPC UA data modeling with Matrikon Data Broker (MDB).
Good morning, good afternoon, good evening – wherever you are in the world!
The highlights from 2022 were significant: from the field to the cloud and back again, OPC UA is solving evermore data integration challenges. Our areas of focus in 2023 include bringing clarity to the confusion surrounding standardization, harmonizing our information models, driving OPC UA competency in other markets, and exhibiting OPC UA at a myriad of events. Thanks for reading!
The OPC Foundation is proud to announce, and congratulates, those elected to Board seats for 2023-2024. OPCF also welcomes the launch of the “.NET User Group” initiated by three companies represented on the OPC Foundation Board of Directors: ABB, Microsoft, and SAP. Plus: join OPCF at trade shows and events in 2023 with our Call-for-Sponsors.
Rosendahl Nextrom develops and manufactures equipment for the global cable, fiber optics and battery industry. Their changeover to OPC UA took place in the course of a one-month pilot project. it had to be ensured that all required plant components from a wide range of manufacturers could be connected with OPC UA. The implementation was fast and smooth.
New UAFX specifications have passed in-depth OPCF member reviews and extensive prototyping to ensure their implementations maintain cross-vendor interoperability. As such, automation vendors can now start adopting UAFX functionality in their offerings, and end-users can look forward to the advantages that UAFX-based field communications offer.
The Compliance Working Group has been busy this year, focusing on improving test cases in three main areas: Companion Specifications, OPC UA Field EXchange (UAFX), and Ethernet-APL. More devices than planned were tested in 2022, and demand is already strong for 2023.
Dr. Karl-Heinz Niemann of the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Hannover, Germany, is running a project called, “Development of energy management interfaces for IoT technologies” (IoT_EnRG). The project recognized, very early on, that OPC UA was critical to harmonize and model energy consumption data.
Analog Devices, Arm, Amazon Web Services (AWS), B&R Industrial Automation, Lattice Semiconductor, Schneider Electric and Texas Instruments, entered a collaboration to create a permissive, open source OPC UA over TSN (Time Sensitive Networking) stack on FreeRTOS.
By now, we expect that most readers have probably used or explored using the OPC UA standards. What you may not realize is the power available to you in other parts of the OPC UA standard. In this article we will cover the 3 functionalities we are seeing most often: Methods, Pub/Sub, and Companion Specifications.