Those who can remember the early days of Internet workings might be familiar with the Publish-Subscribe method of electronic messaging. It is due to the emergence of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) that we have returned to the pub/sub method as a best practice standard for data transmission. IoT gateways provide a bridge between an on-premises communications network and a cloud-based one.
Have you ever been in a situation where you were working with both Wonderware and some other client (HMI, SCADA, other) and needed to share data? Well, in the practical, real world, having clients from more than one vendor is a reality of existence in the process/control world. Essentially, this article tells you how to turn your Wonderware system into an OPC UA Server.
As a long-term active partner of the OPC Foundation, Beckhoff was among the earliest adopters to implement the OPC UA standard in many innovative ways. After enabling the standardized exchange of data via OPC UA for many years, it has become even better with additional new features that improve the modeling of systems, security, and usability.
The OPC Foundation North America Seminar Tour dates have been announced. This seminar tour will focus on the rich feature set of OPC UA and the unique ways these features are put to use in real applications. Beeond’s OPC UA Developer training is offered in conjunction with three of the OPC Foundation Seminars. This hands-on developer training educates attendees on the technical aspects of the standard, so they have the knowledge to make good decisions in designing and delivering a Certified OPC UA product.
There are five new products to announce this issue. First is RFID cloud connectivity enabled by OPC UA from Siemens. Next is IO-Link and OPC UA connectivity from Comtrol. Softing announces commercial licences for the open-source .NET OPC UA stack. Integration Objects introduces a proxy between OPC UA servers and OPC DA clients. Finally, Unified Automation has expanded their UaGateway with AMQP and MQTT capabilities.
Welcome to the April edition of the OPC connect newsletter!
2017 has already started off by being a banner year in terms of OPC technology and marketing activities. I have attended and presented at numerous different events in the first three months of the year. 2017 is shaping up to be a very busy year for the OPC Foundation. We are eager to keep you abreast of the expansion of the OPC UA technology and progress made on the collaboration front. We appreciate you taking time out of your busy schedule to check out what we have been up to.
Industrie 4.0 with its mandatory requirement of OPC UA is focused on security and high efficiency in manufacturing. Therefore it is no wonder that the OPC Foundation has created an official office in South Korea and will be making waves at Hannover Messe later this month.
A central challenge of Industrie 4.0 and the Industrial Internet of things (IIoT) is secure standardized data and the exchange of information between devices, machines, and services from various industries. The OPC UA standard is the only mandatory protocol required in the criteria checklist of “Product capabilities for Industrie 4.0 Products” provided by the German Industrie 4.0 Platform.
As information workflows cross competence domains in several directions, users and providers start looking for a way to coalesce those standards into a farther-reaching, whole-encompassing interoperability “grammar”.
That is one of the main reasons why OPC UA was created.
Any client that needs to work with an OPC UA Server has to understand the information model present in the server and discover the instance of the model to be able to wire up to the correct nodes to exchange data. The usage of NodesetFiles [sic] greatly simplifies the exchange of OPC UA information models and the configuration of clients and servers. Users can be assured that their configuration is correct and it can minimize testing of systems.