There were two main takeaways from this year’s Hannover Fair: one, the omnipresence of OPC UA on many of the booths; and two, the collaborations signed with many different organizations. It seemed like everywhere you looked at the Hannover Fair, there was and OPC logo. On the collaboration front, the OPC Foundation has been busy solidifying OPC UA as the networking standard for Industrie 4.0 and the Industrial Internet of Things.
The Gotthard Base Tunnel in Switzerland, when open this June, at 57 km will be the longest railway tunnel in the world. OPC UA was defined as the standardized interface between the tunnel management system and the electromechanical systems. Given the need to integrate sixteen different facilities from different suppliers, it was vital to use a platform-neutral, standardized and uniform protocol. This case study from Siemens is accompanied by a list of 11 of their products with OPC UA on board.
CIAT, situated in the Rhone-Alpes region of France in Culoz, has been an expert producer of air conditioning, refrigeration and heating units for 80 years. They implemented ICONICS’ GENESIS64™ and OPC UA Server Suite, across their entire building following a three-month pilot program. Also, ICONICS recently introduced its new IoT Gateway Suite, and enhanced integration with the next generation of Microsoft Azure cloud platform and services.
In the past, Lenze used to rely on the OPC Classic to enable access to device data. However, as this standard no longer covers advanced requirements, the company opted for the development of an OPC UA Server. This was achieved using a Toolkit from Softing. Also, Softing’s new white paper discusses OPC UA Publisher / Subscriber communication for IIoT and outlines details on a proof-of-concept implementation.
DCI Technologies needed a reliable method for tapping into their radios’ serial diagnostics data remotely so that troubleshooting could occur without having to visit each individual site. To meet the end goal of providing an open solution, they considered several rapid protocol modeling solutions providing standard interfaces such as OPC DA, OPC UA and DDE. In the end, their chosen solution was the OmniServer OPC and I/O Server from Software Toolbox.
It’s no secret down on the shop floor, or in the upper echelons of management, that IT and OT don’t always see eye to eye. For decades, the business computing world of Information Technology (IT) has been growing and evolving separately from the Operational Technology (OT) world. Be that as it may, these two worlds are now poised to make contact. Businesses are waking up to the value of the data that’s coming from production systems.
Welcome to the March 2016 edition of the OPC Foundation OPC Connect newsletter. 2016 has already started with a multitude of opportunities for the Foundation; its members, and the whole OPC community. Interoperability through collaboration continues to be the key objective of the end-user community in industrial automation.
The market increasingly demands individualized products. Product life cycles are getting shorter and average lot sizes are getting smaller. Considering this, cost efficient production in a globalized and resource limited environment requires a highly flexible (IT-) infrastructure that also works well in cross-enterprise networks.
In its OPC UA working group, the OPC Foundation concentrates on enhancing the OPC Unified Architecture (UA) standard. Besides the existing Request/Response mechanism, which requires a “standing” connection between an OPC Client (data consumer) and an OPC Server (data provider), OPC UA will be enhanced with an additional communication schema following the principles of Publish-Subscribe.
OPC Classic – or OLE for Process Control – quickly established itself on the market almost 20 years ago. This was, among other things, because the standard provided both users and controller and display system manufacturers’ significant advantages. OPC UA, the technology that replaced it, is available on the market and provides even more utility.