Recently, a large manufacturer of raw materials for the power generation industry needed to accomplish what would seem to be a relatively straightforward task – to gather comprehensive temperature and humidity data across facilities where vacuum furnaces operate to harden materials. The engineer discovered that an OPC Server for consuming RESTful JSON web services would easily facilitate consuming the required data in real-time and exposing it via OPC.
One vision of Industry 4.0 is of a highly automated, harmonious production line that relies on minimal human intervention. This goal requires seamless communication between different machines, networks and applications. Luckily for industry, that’s where the OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA) protocol comes into play.
The City of Enid, Oklahoma is located 70 miles North of Oklahoma City. The city’s water management services include production, distribution and reclamation. It includes approximately 140 producing underground water wells with 200 miles of collection lines, 23 million gallons of storage tanks, seven pumping stations and two treatment plants. The department wanted a solution that easily integrated with OPC UA standards and could handle over 1,400 tags.
ABB was selected as the main automation contractor for the world’s first operation focused on converting gas from coal seams into liquefied natural gas. With several new wells being introduced every day, ABB needed to be able to bring them on and off line in a highly streamlined and efficient manner; furthermore, the method of configuring them needed to be simple, fast, and very reliable.
Collaboration has been and continues to be the cornerstone of success for the OPC Foundation. Developing solutions for many vertical markets is the vision of the OPC Foundation. When open standards are adopted across verticals, all users benefit. For example, that effort continues today to extend OPC UA beyond industrial automation into new territory like healthcare. And in industrial automation, that goal is furthered by collaboration with associations like CSIA.
New announcements include an updated visualization package from ECG, a new OPC server version from Kepware, an OPC firewall from Phoenix Contact, a new HMI/SCADA from Progea, and Windows 10 support from both Softing and Unified Automation.
Welcome to the June 2015 edition of the OPC Connect newsletter. There are so many great things that are happening in the world of OPC Unified Architecture. OPC UA is getting international recognition as the interoperability platform for everything related to industrial automation, plus other domains, and the system solution for the Industrial Internet of Things and Industrie 4.0.
The OPC Foundation opens the doors to facilitate increased adoption of OPC Unified Architecture technology beyond industrial automation! The OPC Foundation is implementing an “open shared source” strategy…
The German Industrie 4.0 platform, consisting of ZVEI, VDMA, and BITKOM, has jointly reached important milestones in the standardization of Industrie 4.0. The first version of a reference architecture model for Industrie 4.0 (RAMI 4.0) which precisely describes Industrie 4.0-compliant production equipment, has been developed. OPC UA is listed as the one and only recommendation for realizing the ‘communication’ layer.
OPC UA paves the way for the implementation of new concepts with increased vertical and horizontal data integration, and opens the door to industries requiring seamless data logging. Supporting use in both PCs and embedded systems, OPC UA technology allows the implementation of solutions that move intelligence from the supervisory control systems to the local components.