Skip to content

Energy Savings in Heavy Industry Facilities

    By David Hill, Opto 22

    A large heavy-industries corporation in Asia supports economic development worldwide by providing basic industrial materials and by building the facilities needed for industrial growth. The company’s portfolio of products includes castings and forgings, nuclear and thermal power plants, water desalination plants, material handling systems, and more. Products and components are manufactured in multiple sub-factories, and a large quantity of electricity, gas, and water is consumed by each facility in the process. The amount of energy used varies in each sub-factory based on the manufacturing requirements of the products produced.

    It was clear that real-time electricity, gas, and water consumption data for each sub-factory had to be captured in an electronic form that was available to the ERP system for analysis. To implement this, the company…

    Energy Monitoring, Analytics & Big Data in Real Estate

      By Stefan Hoppe, TwinCAT Product Manager, BECKHOFF Automation; President of the OPC Foundation Europe

      Energy monitoring in decentralized real estate properties enables operators to establish energetically optimized statutory management requirements. As an example, the municipal sector often operates up to 2,000 real estate properties via facility management. The energy monitoring system, e2watch® from regio iT Corporation for Information Technology has been developed in cooperation with the real estate and facility management department of the city of Aachen, Germany.

      The e2watch® system utilizes a compact Beckhoff controller as a decentralized control unit for data acquisition and buffering. However, the most sophisticated feature is the synchronization with the Cloud using a configurable scheduler. This system uses the manufacturer-independent interoperability standard, OPC-UA (also known as international standard IEC 62541) with integrated security mechanisms as a data transport layer. The collected data gets pushed from a control unit (acting as a PLCopen function block standardized OPC-UA Client) as historical data…

      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…