Most people would immediately associate the OPC and OPC UA communication protocols with industrial automation. For the most part, that perception hasn’t entirely changed, but the evolution of related software solutions has provided a reason to consider OPC technology as part of a more comprehensive automation strategy.
The first quarter of this year has been exciting -to say the least. It is my pleasure to welcome you to the first issue of OPC Connect in 2020. Please continue reading for updates on the many activities and results from the OPC Foundation. Thanks for your interest!
The OPC UA Safety working group has achieved a key milestone publishing Release 1.00 of the specification for the interoperable communication standard for functional safety: OPC UA Safety “Part 15 OPC UA Core Specification”. OPC Foundation members are invited to participate in a co-funding project to develop a software stack.
The OPC Foundation has been aggressively working on enhancing it certification program and has recently released a new beta version of the Compliance Test Tool (CTT). Many working groups are looking at requiring certification testing as part of their OPC UA Companion Specification. Join us at an InterOP to learn more.
The OPC Foudation is pleased to welcome L’Oréal, the world’s largest cosmetics company as a new OPC Foundation member. Beyond choosing to standardize on OPC UA as a key enabler for its IIoT era Operations 4.0 initiative, L’Oréal decided to join so it could actively participate in the development of the OPC UA standard.
The successful ability to deploy a robust Modular Procedural Automation (MPA) has been demonstrated at Air Liquide’s Ingleside, TX air separation unit. An Emerson DeltaV PK controller acts as the supervisory platform for MPA with an OPC UA interface and is connected to a legacy Foxboro DCS with an OPC DA interface through Cogent DataHub.
To exchange transactional-, conditional- and logistical-data with MES, ERP and Cloud Services in an affordable manner, standardization and fast to configure connectivity technology for new and legacy equipment is key. METTLER TOLEDO can easily connect legacy and new products for static weighing to modern data management systems.
“This new version 10.96 product release of ICONICS automation software suite represents great strides in engineering in multiple areas,” said Russ Agrusa, CEO of ICONICS. A new launch video has also been released highlighting the software’s potential.
Even early on, Microsoft knew how important it would be for manufacturers to connect and communicate across disparate systems. That’s why they’ve built support for the OPC UA standard into their full spectrum of IIoT solutions. This frees manufacturers to choose the equipment and tools that best fit their needs, knowing those solutions will integrate with their stack.
Version 1.31 of Softing’s uaToolkit Embedded adds metadata and discovery announcements to OPC UA field devices which eliminates the need for preset information in the subscriber.
Welcome! Not only is Christmas is coming unexpectedly fast – also for me personally the first year as President that started in October 2018 has passed incredibly fast! So, let’s first look back a little on what happened and then look to the future. Enjoy this issue of OPC Connect!
Microsoft is 100% committed to OPC UA. In fact, Microsoft was the first cloud vendor to embrace OPC UA back in 2015, and has contributed more open-source code to the OPC Foundation than everyone else combined by a factor of 10. So why do we do it? Well, it fits perfectly into our openness strategy.