In the landscape of industrial automation, OPC has served as the cornerstone for communication between devices and systems. The once-revolutionary OPC Classic protocol, while robust in its time, now encounters challenges in the face of modern industrial requirements. That’s where migrating to OPC UA comes in.
Good morning, good afternoon, good evening – wherever you are in the world!
OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA) connects machines with each other, machines with services, and also services with each other. The LADS Hack-a-thon event in Waldbronn, Germany, further showed me that OPC UA connects people also!
This month we released a new version of the Conformance Test Tool (CTT). This release provides initial testing of the OPC UA FX specifications with a target of eventually having between 90% and 95% of all OPC UA FX testing automated.
New UAFX specifications have been released, along with revisions to existing editions. The latest release of the Conformance Test Tool (CTT) now also supports initial testing of the UAFX information model. Plus, find us at many upcoming events, particularly in Asia.
For vital infrastructure like water supply facilities, availability and reliability are essential to successful water processing. Communication specifications for data from various vendors differ for each site, and across vast distances. Takebishi’s DeviceGateway harmonizes data from 320 different series of products like PLCs and sensors into OPC UA.
Paessler PRTG OPC UA Server, a new product extension for PRTG, is designed to help OT teams get monitoring data from network components and the IIoT into their supervisory and control systems. The most important benefit of bringing the network components into an OT overview is to have all important monitoring in a centralized tool.
Version 5.30 of dataFEED OPC Suite from Softing Industrial offers two new features: an OPC UA tunnel to increase security for OPC Classic communication plus support for InfluxDB databases.
Store & Forward is a term for technology that recognizes when non-local storage locations are not available, and locally stores data in a persistent data store, and forwards that data on to the remote location when it is available again. For example, DataHub can log to ODBC databases, historians, or cloud destinations.
Matrikon Data Broker (MDB) v2.3 makes it easier than ever to manage large OT data address spaces and makes more data types available for sharing enterprise-wide and to the cloud. Also, read a case study to learn how Chevron Phillips Chemical utilizes MDB in their infrastructure.
SIOTH®, short for Smart IoT Highway, is a secure integration platform for unifying and structuring disparate and multiple IT and OT data sources. Using the graphical environment of SIOTH® platform configurator, a multi-protocol OPC UA Server can be built in a matter of minutes. This generates the OPC UA Universal Server.