Welcome to the final edition of the OPC Foundation OPC Connect newsletter of 2016. It has been a very exciting year. We have seen record growth in adoption of the OPC UA technology across multiple domains and vertical markets. The OPC Foundation policy of being truly open has expanded the reach of the OPC technology. The specifications are available to everyone, the technology is open sourced, and now we have opened up our certification labs to non-members.
The OPC Foundation is making its certification program, previously only available to OPC Foundation members, completely open and available to non-members. They will be able to use the OPC Foundation certification tools and certify their OPC enabled products as such. Also, the OPC Foundation is opening new certification labs with Ingenieurbuero Allmendinger in Salach, Germany and at the Beijing Institute of Technology in China.
The MDIS Companion standard will be released in December and has completed a full function Interoperability test (IOP) which included a demonstration to Operating companies of the MDIS standard. Its goal is to standardize the interface between subsea systems and the platform DCS system. This includes both the communication (OPC UA) and the information model that is transferred.
There’s no doubt – many in the manufacturing industries believe IoT and Industrie 4.0 are essentially stuck at the concept level and there is no standard available for tools and solutions today in the automation market. However, this is only perception; reality is a completely different story. How prepared are you to leverage ALL the data from 120 million connected devices from automation suppliers … already today!
OpSIT is a project supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research whose goal is to support the health sector with the optimized application of Smart Item Technologies, using the example of patient care. The choice to use the industrial-oriented protocol OPC UA came from its flexibility and near real-time capability to transport the encrypted delivery intake report to the care cloud gateway server (OPC UA Historian Server).
Softing Industrial has signed an agreement with the OPC Foundation to supply the OPC’s Open-SCS working group with Softing’s OPC UA toolkits and to offer technical consultancy to the group.
Varroc group (Varroc), a global auto component manufacturer was looking for a comprehensive solution to leverage their Industry 4.0 initiatives across their plants. This involved connecting a multitude of machines, systems, and sensors which were on heterogeneous control systems, communicating on different protocols to a single data tunnel through OPC.
At its core, OPC UA combines a robust, secure communication protocol with a flexible information modeling framework. A challenge for the PLC vendor deploying OPC UA in embedded devices is how to represent different customers’ information modeling requirements in a common way.
This month’s new products include a new suite to send OPC UA information over MQTT, a Wrapper that converts OPC classic into OPC UA, native OPC UA implementation into a popular server, and a multi-protocol gateway with OPC UA capability.