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.
Companies join the OPC Foundation for many reasons:
KUKA joined to influence the direction of the technology and contribute to its progress through working groups. Read their reasons in this magazine interview, reproduced on the OPC Foundation website.
While OPC UA today is mostly recognized for its communication virtues (regarding scalability, security, performance, platform-independence), one of its most exciting features remains in the shadows. Information modeling, or the ability to express not only data but also the meaning of data, is a key concept in the quest to make systems more intelligent, more autonomous and more evolvable. While the full potential of information modeling in industrial applications remains to be demonstrated by academic research, many of its core ideas can be applied right now.
Softing introduced a gateway for data connection of Siemens S7 PLCs to OPC UA clients and demonstrated the first OPC UA Publisher/Subscriber real-time stack.
Cogent Real-Time Systems announced that in full support of the OPC Foundation’s OPC UA initiatives, the next release of the Cogent DataHub will feature both OPC UA server and OPC UA client connectivity.
The month of September through November for the OPC Foundation is always a very, very busy time of year. The end of September is the beginning of the North American seminar tour, and the OPC Foundation Booth at PackExpo in Las Vegas. The SPS/IPC/Drives show in Nuremberg, Germany takes place in November. There are also regional events in Finland and Belgium this year. I highly encourage you to take time out from your busy schedule and visit OPC at one of these numerous venues, and learn where OPC is going.
While IoT standards and interoperability are likely to be subjects of ongoing debate and discussion over the next few years, there are already well-established standards in industrial and manufacturing environments that can accelerate the shift to outcome-based models. In fact, OPC Unified Architecture is a platform independent service oriented architecture that provides standard models for secure and reliable information exchange in industrial automation across a range of manufacturing and resource industries.
Is your product one of the 108 products Certified by the OPC Foundation? Certified product prove they are ready for production environments as they demonstrate compliance, interoperability with other vendors’ products, robustness, graceful recovery from bad communications, and don’t over-consume vital system resources.
It’s an exciting time of year for the OPC Foundation as many events across the globe are gearing up. From a seminar tour in North America to workshops across Europe, there are ample opportunities to meet with OPC Foundation members and experts. These span not only continents but industries as well including dedicated events for track-and-trace, packaging, enterprise/IT, and of course automation.