As we get further into 2017 we continue making great strides with OPC technology and marketing activities. Stefan Hoppe and I continue to go out and evangelize the OPC UA technology at a multitude of different events the world over. Just in the months of April and May I have been in five different countries presenting and talking about the limitless applications of OPC UA.
Thank you for taking the time to read this June edition of our OPC Connect newsletter!
Due to the relevance of OPC UA to Industrie 4.0 and German Industry, the BSI performed an in-depth security analysis of the OPC UA specifications and a selected reference implementation. An extensive analysis of the security functions in the specification of OPC UA confirmed that OPC UA was designed with a focus on security and does not contain systematic security vulnerabilities.
The OPC Foundation has announced an open-source implementation of the OPC UA technology, available on GitHub to truly enable the OPC community’s successful adoption of OPC UA across all markets and all platforms.
The Industrie 4.0 Platform published a checklist for classifying and advertising products as Industrie 4.0 “Basic”, “Ready” or “Full”. To comply with the “Industrie 4.0 communication” criterion, even the lowest category requires a product to be addressable over the network via TCP/UDP or IP and to integrate at least the OPC UA information model. As a result, any product being advertised as “Industrie 4.0-enabled” must be OPC UA-capable (either integrated or via a gateway).
Clearly, all the efforts around a reliable and flexible implementation of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and Industrie 4.0 have prompted the research of many different ways to exchange information among industrial systems. And once again, the advantage of the OPC UA design is that – since its inception and for its very nature – it is a specification that can fit more than one scenario and does not constrain innovation but enables it.
Those who can remember the early days of Internet workings might be familiar with the Publish-Subscribe method of electronic messaging. It is due to the emergence of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) that we have returned to the pub/sub method as a best practice standard for data transmission. IoT gateways provide a bridge between an on-premises communications network and a cloud-based one.
Have you ever been in a situation where you were working with both Wonderware and some other client (HMI, SCADA, other) and needed to share data? Well, in the practical, real world, having clients from more than one vendor is a reality of existence in the process/control world. Essentially, this article tells you how to turn your Wonderware system into an OPC UA Server.
As a long-term active partner of the OPC Foundation, Beckhoff was among the earliest adopters to implement the OPC UA standard in many innovative ways. After enabling the standardized exchange of data via OPC UA for many years, it has become even better with additional new features that improve the modeling of systems, security, and usability.
The OPC Foundation North America Seminar Tour dates have been announced. This seminar tour will focus on the rich feature set of OPC UA and the unique ways these features are put to use in real applications. Beeond’s OPC UA Developer training is offered in conjunction with three of the OPC Foundation Seminars. This hands-on developer training educates attendees on the technical aspects of the standard, so they have the knowledge to make good decisions in designing and delivering a Certified OPC UA product.
There are five new products to announce this issue. First is RFID cloud connectivity enabled by OPC UA from Siemens. Next is IO-Link and OPC UA connectivity from Comtrol. Softing announces commercial licences for the open-source .NET OPC UA stack. Integration Objects introduces a proxy between OPC UA servers and OPC DA clients. Finally, Unified Automation has expanded their UaGateway with AMQP and MQTT capabilities.