Welcome,
First of all, I invite you to join us June 8-10 for OPC Day International. This major event is not to be missed. In this issue we also have news from: the OPC UA FX Working Group; OPC Hub ASEAN/Singapore; the Ethernet APL Project; special news for higher learning institutions (OPC UAcademic); and so much more. Thank you for reading!
Register today and participate over three days with firsthand OPC Foundation and OPC UA information. OPC Day International will run twice per day to cover all time zones and regions. Hear from keynotes, technical experts, and end-user applications.
The OPC Foundation has expanded its support for learning institutions through its new OPC UAcademic program. New OPC UA training content donated by the OPC Foundation offers academic institutions ready-made course material for use in their curriculum.
More than 320 experts from over 60 OPC Foundation member companies have been contributing to the completion of the first release candidate (RC1) of the OPC UA FX (Field eXchange) specifications. Also, a beta version of the OPC UA Safety Stack software is now available for the 31 companies that collaborated to produce the code.
The OPC Hub ASEAN/Singapore has signed an MoU with Ngee Ann Polytechnic and Singapore Polytechnic to promote awareness of OPC UA. In addition, an MoU with Singapore Industrial Automation Association has been established to promote awareness of OPC UA to the system integration and solution provider community.
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.
The Compliance Working Group within the OPC Foundation has been hard at work preparing the certification for supporting OPC UA over Ethernet Advanced Physical Layer (APL) and OPC UA over Time Sensitive Networking (TSN). Learn about our progress.
OPC UA has been adopted as a recommended standard for Industry 4.0, and the spread of OPC UA is progressing as a global interoperability standard that supports manufacturing and manufacturing DX (digital transformation) in the digital era. Four use-cases are presented describing accomplishments in different industries.
The Institute for High Energy Physics (IFAE) in Barcelona is a world-leading organization in particle physics, astrophysics, and cosmology research. Learn how OPC UA met their requirements perfectly while also allowing standardization of the communications between different institutes for such a big project.
Data from automation systems used to stay put. It was produced by sensors, PLCs, and recorders; stored on local OPC servers and databases; and accessed by a few skilled operators and engineers. Although highly secure, data access was limited. All of that is changing.
OPC UA methods provide a flexible means for OPC UA clients to request functionality from an OPC UA server, such as requesting recipe data from an ERP system, triggering a label print using inputs from a database, and so much more. Additionally, a wide variety of systems that leverage REST continue to emerge as data sources, driving the need for converting that data to OPC UA for consumption by client applications.
ICONICS has recently appointed Edward (“Ted”) Hill as the company’s new President and CEO. Hill replaces Yuji Ichioka, who served as the Interim President and CEO following the November 2020 retirement of the company’s founder, Russ Agrusa.