FLIR Intelligent Transportation Systems develops a wide variety of hardware and software solutions for vehicular/pedestrian traffic video detection and monitoring. Very often, these systems rely on open standard OPC UA interfacing to obtain information from the different subsystems.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is promising major operational benefits by closing the gap between production and IT. What’s needed is a way to move field-level data from existing manufacturing networks to the cloud-based applications. An OPC UA + MQTT gateway makes it possible to access a field device via the TCP/IP channel of an Industrial Ethernet network, but without PLC involvement.
2016 seems to be the year of certifying embedded UA Servers. Several other embedded UA products are also scheduled for testing. OPC UA is truly cross-platform. Embedded UA products have long been promised and are now a reality. Do you have an embedded device that needs to be certified?
OPC has been in the news recently. OPC Foundation had a booth at the annual embedded world Exhibition & Conference. OPC UA is front and center in the Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) Testbed that was founded as part of the Industrial Internet Consortium. And the ARC Advisory Group discussed the technology in an IIoT article regarding collaboration among automation vendors. Included is a list of upcoming events.
What’s the buzz with IIOT, Industrie 4.0, IoT, and M2M? Is it real or is it just marketing hype?
There are many buzzwords, three letter acronyms (TLA) and proliferation of phrases that attempt to define and communicate all this terminology that some people are summing up as the Internet of Everything. What we know is that all of these buzzwords and acronyms seemingly all have one thing in common, they are all fundamentally founded assuming Ethernet-based technology.
OPC is being used in the production of electricity with zero emissions. PROGEA is one of the companies that participated in the technology innovation project called Enerclean, coordinated by the Department of Science and Engineering, University of Modena & Reggio. The project involves the production of clean energy and hydrogen through the natural process of combustion of aluminum powder on contact with water. The goal is to get a high efficiency energy system with near zero environmental impact.
OPC Foundation has been active in events and collaborations in 2015. A six-city North American seminar tour provided technical information on OPC UA. We are presenting OPC UA at members’ user meetings with frequency. Finally, we exhibited at SPS/IPC/Drives where additional collaborations were announced.
The OPC Foundation increases the adoption of OPC UA by collaboration with other trade organizations. “We have signed collaboration agreements with Profibus & Profinet International, ESPG (Powerlink), Sercos International, and m2m-Alliance,” announced Stefan Hoppe at the OPC Foundation press conference at the SPS Show. These organizations use OPC UA as a secure transport channel to reach interoperability to other systems.
Certification continues to be prominent feature of OPC UA because it provides a high level of assurance that a product complies with the specifications. It assures the product is interoperable, robust, reliable, and efficient with resources. It is without surprise why users, organizations, and standards bodies are adopting OPC UA.
A first-person impression of an OPC InterOp: This workshop is “the event” for testing OPC products for interoperability. Vendors can test and debug their products against one another for not only interoperability, but also compliance and reliability. IOP workshops also provide an ideal opportunity to learn about OPC technology and to interact with industry-leading experts.