Welcome to OPC Connect September 2019! I hope that you have relaxed during the summer holidays and that you are fully prepared for the next challenges ahead. Before we look to the future, let me briefly summarize what has happened since our last issue in June. A lot is going on around the world and there have been great successes with various Companion Specifications. Read on to learn more!
The OPC Foundation is pleased to announce the availability of the OPC UA Online Reference, which is a searchable collection of its specifications and information models. This site features hyperlinked and searchable versions of all OPC UA specifications and companion specifications. We hope this site will quickly become an invaluable tool for anyone developing OPC UA applications.
“Today there are up to 12 different machine languages in use worldwide, which doesn’t exactly make global networking of plants easy,” says Michael Schweiger, Volkswagen Account & Demand Manager. He is in charge of OPC UA, together with around 30 people working on the topic across all brands in the Volkswagen Group.
The OPC Foundation’s vision for facilitating the creation of globally harmonized information models via OPC UA Companion Specifications reaches its first milestone and demonstrates the path forward to true semantic interoperability -as released by the VDMA Machine Vision Initiative.
The OPC Foundation, in conjunction with the MTConnect Institute, announce the release of the jointly developed “OPC Unified Architecture for MTConnect Companion Specification Part 1”. The MTConnect OPC UA Companion Specification expresses the MTConnect stream and device information models via the OPC UA modeling language.
With umati, the machine tool industry represents a quantum leap for the implementation of Industry 4.0 in production. Today’s customers expect to be able to integrate new machines into their own IT ecosystems with no difficulty. umati does this on the basis of the international interoperability standard OPC UA – easily, quickly and securely.
With umati, the machine tool industry, for the first time, has a vendor-neutral communication interface specification. In addition, because OPC UA is its underlying technology, umati will be capable of being deployed in future end-to-end solutions spanning entire process chains in the manufacturing industry.
For over 100 years, a large global chemicals manufacturer has been leading innovation with gases, technology, and related services used by many industries worldwide. The company’s engineering team began to explore how they could migrate from their traditional method of control to a system of ‘state-based’ control, using OPC UA.
In early 2018, Part 14 of the OPC UA Standard, aka “Publish-Subscribe” or “PubSub” was released, helping to encourage further interaction between OPC UA and communications protocols such as MQTT.
No matter in which part of the world you are, as a representative of the OPC Foundation you are always welcomed, since the challenge of industrial interoperability exists worldwide and can only be solved together. Global cooperation and harmonization are key tasks for the OPC Foundation going forward -not just across borders but inside vertical industries as well.