Welcome,
It’s the middle of December and therefore a good time to review the year and also to give an outlook for next year. Spontaneously, one might think “nothing happened this year – COVID-19 overshadowed everything and flattened all activities”. From the OPC Foundation’s point of view, one can give a different picture: COVID-19 did not stop the OPC Foundation but made us even more effective!
The OPC Foundation’s Field Level Communications initiative has accomplished a significant milestone in the ongoing project by completing their initial release candidate with the focus on the Controller-to-Controller (C2C) use case. Download the Technical Paper here.
The OPC Foundation Interoperability (InterOp, or IOP) Task Force has been working to establish the infrastructure needed to allow for a virtual IOP. After addressing any issues resulting from an upcoming test run, we will have an official IOP available for all vendors to register for by the new year.
In addition to the Board, Emerson also joins the OPC Foundation Field Level Communications (FLC) initiative to drive a holistic approach to sensor and device level communications across process and factory automation industries.
The OPC Foundation and CESMII have initiated a new Joint Working Group joined by major industry players to enable manufacturers to speed up pre-built shop floor and digitalization applications.
The OPC Foundation is pleased to announce the establishment of the new “Laboratory Agnostic Device Standard (LADS) based on OPC UA” as a Joint Working Group together with SPECTARIS and VDMA.
The goal of this cooperation agreement is to combine the power of the OPC UA and ECLASS (formerly eCl@ss) standards to better enable M2M interoperability via seamless communication of data and semantics using a standardized set of interfaces.
The extended “OPC UA for IEC61131-3” specification now supports the current 3rd edition of the IEC61131-3 standard and simplifies vendor adoption.
With more than 200 Industrial PCs in operation, the 2,150-meter-long Kaisermühlen Tunnel in Vienna shows that modular PC-based control technology from Beckhoff, plus OPC UA linkage at the controller level, make for an optimum automation platform in this environment.
ICONICS has announced an agreement with Takebishi Corporation to integrate the Takebishi DeviceXPlorer OPC Server with its own OPC-based automation software solutions. The parties plan future collaboration, such as the integration of the configuration environment for the Takebishi DeviceXPlorer OPC Server into the ICONICS Workbench and the ICONICS IoTWorX™ IoT software solution.
While it may not be obvious, OPC UA and American football share common ground. Most importantly, both require smart action and good protection in rough environments. To address this, the ACI400 IIoT Edge device from METTLER TOLEDO provides secure data exchange using the OPC UA Companion Specification for simple static weighing.
The push towards integrating any and all devices into your enterprise charges forward, with IIoT and Industrie 4.0 initiatives emerging in virtually every industry. But not every device has a ready-made, off-the-shelf driver for integration with other devices and other industrial systems.