President’s Welcome – December 2021

A warm welcome to you all,
I have done it. Did you too? Were you also mistaken? Since April 2020 with the first wave here in Germany, we live from quarter to quarter in the hope that everything will soon be over. “In 2021, everything will get better again” -was the hope at the end of 2020. Not that the virus will dissipate, but life will be again so that we humans can handle it, with the vaccine and all of our behavior. One year later and despite the impression of the cancelled SPS fair, that same hope exists again: “In 2022, everything will be better!”

General Assembly Meeting & Board of Directors Election Results

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.

OPC UA, MQTT, and Information Interoperability

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.

OPC UA Field Level Communications (FLC) News

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.

Compliance Corner – December 2021

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.

Collaboration Update – OPCF & CESMII

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.

Collaboration Update – OPCF & VDMA

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.

TwinCAT 3 with OPC UA Pub/Sub and On-Demand OPC UA Webinar

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.

OPC UA Publisher/Subscriber in Cloud-Based Solutions

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.

IT/OT Convergence: OPC UA – More Than Just Another Protocol

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.

A Few Things to Know about I4.0, Digital Transformation, and Connectivity

How do we unleash a new level of innovation for small and medium-sized enterprises? Standardized information models and access to data are the key –standardization to the point that applications can be pre-built to recognize and use the information from an organization’s processes. ICONICS, a Mitsubishi Group company supports these standardization efforts.

Exploring Cybersecurity and OPC UA for a Secure System Architecture

This e-book focuses on OPC UA security concepts including but not limited to certificates and message signing, encryption and topics surrounding OPC UA security architecture in your system. It goes beyond that, though, by considering the broader environment in which OPC UA is used and recognizing that most of readers come from the operations technology (OT) space.

Matrikon Q4 2021 News & Updates

Matrikon releases a new whitepaper on an upcoming DCOP security update; announces month-long discounted pricing on its OPC Servers for PLCs; and provides its FLEX software with support for OPC UA PubSub over MQTT.