Skip to content

AutomatedBuildings.com Interviews Tom Burke, President of the OPC Foundation

    An interview of Thomas Burke, President and Executive Director of the OPC Foundation, by Ken Sinclair, Publisher and Owner of AutomatedBuildings.com

    OPC UA is designed for information integration between industrial automation and building automation systems.

    The OPC Foundation has been collaborating with many other standards organizations in the advancement of interoperability by providing an information integration infrastructure for standardizing of complex data models into the easy to understand OPC UA information model namespace. One of the most important collaborations has been building automation.

    Highlights from the OPC Foundation Information Revolution 2014 Conference

      By Bill Lydon, Editor of Automation.com

      The OPC Foundation Information Revolution 2014 Conference was held at Microsoft’s Redmond Campus on August 4-7, 2014. The conference featured industry experts who both presented and learned more about OPC Unified Architecture.

      Tom Burke, Executive Director of the OPC Foundation, opened the conference by reflecting on the history of the OPC Foundation, which was founded in 1996. Burke emphasized that OPC UA is now used to move information in all types of industry applications, from embedded devices to the enterprise and cloud computing. OPC standards and certifications empower users and vendors to implement products and systems with the confidence that OPC Foundation vendor hardware and software building blocks will work together reliably. Today, more than 40,000 products use OPC standards…

      Events Update

        The OPC Foundation conducts and attends several events throughout the year that showcase OPC technology and its member’s solutions. See what’s coming up next and what you may have missed.

        New Product Releases

          Check out the latest product releases from our members:

          ● Kepware KEPServerEX Version 5.15

          ● RoviSys OPC UA Client for OpenVMS

          ● RoviSys OPC UA Server for OpenVMS

          ● RoviSys OPC UA Connector for OpenVMS

          ● GENESIS64™ Version 10.85 Software Suite

          ● Prosys OPC UA Java SDK 2.0

          ● Prosys OPC UA Client for Android 2.0

          OPC UA in the Oil & Gas Industry

            By Tom Burke, President and Executive Director of the OPC Foundation

            Welcome to the June edition of OPC Connect. The theme of this issue is OPC engagement in the Oil & Gas industry. The OPC Foundation has been actively collaborating with many segments of this sector to facilitate interoperable automation.

            I am very excited about these collaborations, as they clearly demonstrate the commitment of our end-users and suppliers to the adoption of OPC UA. This newsletter highlights some of the major achievements of our…

            Compliance Corner

              By Nathan Pocock, Director of Compliance

              Recently, we have seen a high number of test failures due to application crashes and resource leaks, which is part of our extensive behavior and reliability testing. We have written a new whitepaper on Certification Resource Efficiency Testing that addresses these points of failure and walk you through the exact steps we use in the lab.

              Certified OPC products are ideal for production use because they have been tested by the OPC Foundation Certification Test Lab for compliance, interoperability, usability, but most importantly: robust error handling and recovery that will provide years of reliable operations, greatly reducing the costly risks of unavailability and/or shutdown.

              OPC UA & Drilling Automation

                By Martin Cavanaugh

                The Society of Petroleum Engineers has formed a technical section to accelerate the development and implementation of automated drilling systems. Automated drilling systems are intended to increase the productivity of drillers, while at the same time increasing safety for both humans and the environment.

                Shanghai Petrochemical Simplifies Data Acquisition

                  By MatrikonOPC

                  Shanghai Petrochemical’s Manufacturing Execution System (MES) needed to acquire data from the PLC systems of all of its main devices. Data had to be shared between a total of 51 PLC and DCS systems that came from different vendors and included various models. A proprietary data access solution was not feasible due to the complexity of the system; instead, the company needed…

                  Wellhead Operators in Texas Trim Operating Expenses with Automation Technology

                    By Jim Wiles, Software Toolbox

                    The Texas reputation for size comes with some mighty metrics to back it up. As the largest oil producer in the Union, the state’s wellheads are spread over 268,000 square miles. If you are in the oil and gas industry, on-site management and monitoring of land-based wells can be a logistical challenge as well as a considerable expense. The state boasts nearly one working oil or gas well for every square mile, each requiring stringent monitoring and reporting by the Railroad Commission of Texas, the governmental regulatory agency that oversees the state’s oil and gas industry.

                    Not surprisingly, automation technology continues to make a significant impact on the upstream and midstream oil and gas business, especially in the areas of remote…

                    Data Modeling in the Oil & Gas Industry

                      By Rich Hunzinger, B-Scada

                      The Oil and Gas Industry faces a number of new challenges in the coming years. From the obvious challenge of managing a finite resource to ever-changing environmental regulations and the consequent competitive pressures, it’s easy to understand why industry leaders are continually striving to find ways to optimize and improve operational efficiency.

                      The new digital landscape of the industry has led to a proliferation of data, with greater frequency, at every stage of the business lifecycle. This abundance of data has led to new ideas about how this data can best be managed to maximize its value. The standards introduced by PPDM 3.8 include 53 subject areas intended to give executives a model for a Master Data Management solution.

                      A data management model is necessary largely because of the separate data sets that must be monitored – such as location data, well data and production data – which have traditionally been grouped and viewed separately. Now, research is showing that the proliferation of these information “silos” and the lack of a unified view can lead to a number of undesirable…