President’s Welcome – March 2022

A warm welcome to you all,
“Stop the war in Ukraine” must be the first message of my contribution. Conventional wisdom says that sports and business should not comment on politics and religion. But times have changed. For someone like me, who lives in freedom, enjoying the free press and everyone’s right to express their opinion and protest in public, it is easy to call out the crimes of war and the war criminals. Honestly, as a father of 3 children, I don’t know if I would have the same courage that more and more people show, protesting publicly, and facing the risk of being arrested immediately. We technicians and engineers are called to improve the ONE world we all live in with technical solutions for better water, better air, better ground and contributions to solving the world’s climate. Instead, we are all wasting money on weapons now, and there is a war among neighbors in Ukraine.

Digital Transformation at Groupe Renault

Groupe Renault’s plan is to implement the use of OPC UA-enabled devices and equipment at all production sites worldwide, and to implement end-to-end data communication from the sensor to the machines to the cloud and back again using the OPC UA communication standard.

OPC Day International: April 25-29, 2022

OPC Foundation will address different topics each day with keynotes covering OPC UA technology, OPC UA solutions, best practices, and collaboration news. The webinar will be held twice each day to cover all timezones. Register today!

Field Level Communications (FLC) Corner – March 2022

Three years after its launch, the OPC Foundation’s Field Level Communications (FLC) Initiative is preparing for the transition from the first UAFX specification version with the focus on Controller-to-Controller (C2C) to the second UAFX specification version which is extending the UAFX concepts to also cover the use-cases Controller-to-Devices (C2D) and Device-to-Device (D2D).

Compliance Corner – March 2022

The first InterOperability Event of the year is scheduled to start March 21, 2022. It is a hybrid event with in-person attendance at Honeywell in Phoenix, AZ as well as the ability to connect remotely. Lots of work has been happening on the Conformance Test Tool (CTT) to keep up with the rapid pace of development of the OPC UA specifications.

Leveraging OPC-UA PubSub as a DMZ Gateway

PubSub allows using OPC UA directly over the Internet or the cloud using middleware like MQTT and AMQP. Therefore, none of the applications communicate to each other directly. The middleware acts as a broker that directs messages. Therefore Utthunga’s uOPC PubSub Bridge can be implemented as part of an industrialized DMZ, enhancing security.

Centralized Secure Data Integration for IoT-capable Applications

An international producer of high-tech filter systems needed to connect its production sites in almost 25 countries to SAP Business Suite for both enterprise resource planning (ERP) and manufacturing execution system (MES) purposes. Softing provided a two-tier solution based on OPC UA to meet the challenge.

Connecting PLCs to Various Software Packages with OPC UA

Multi-vendor installations of secure production systems corresponding to the international standard OPC UA are spreading. This article introduces an example of the OPC UA products that are used in these systems and the various software packages to which they can be securely and easily connected.

Efficient OPC UA applications with TwinCAT

A fundamental challenge of Industrie 4.0 and IIoT applications is the secure, standardized exchange of data and information between devices, machines and services – even across industries. OPC UA is the industry standard for manufacturer- and platform-independent communication and it can be used extremely efficiently with TwinCAT software from Beckhoff.

Using OPC UA to Bridge the Gap to Your ERP

What are the biggest communication gaps between production environments and ERP systems? Five areas in production are particularly affected that slow down production processes and increase both error rates and workload. How can OPC UA bridge these gaps? Software Toolbox explains how their tools fit.