- By Bill Lydon
- May 31, 2022
- OPC Foundation
- Feature
Summary
The OPC Day International 2022, held as a virtual event from April 25-29, 2022, illustrated the broad and growing scope of OPC Foundation standards to achieve manufacturing information integration from field devices to enterprise and cloud.
The multi-day OPC Day International 2022 virtual event attracted more than 1,810 registered attendees and featured 32 presentations over 5 days. Topics included carbon capture, security, OPC UA over MQTT, field-level OPC UA, building automation, OPC applications and more.
My impressions
The OPC Foundation has the strongest and broadest standards ecosystem to achieve digital manufacturing goals with platform-independent service-oriented architecture semantic information modeling framework that turns data into information.
The OPC Foundation ecosystem is unifying, made up of industrial, information technology (IT), Internet of Things (IoT), and cloud organizations participating in more than 65 joint working groups focused on defining and implementing standard contextual and semantic data models from industrial field devices including sensors/actuators to enterprise and cloud systems. There are more than 850 OPC Foundation members and thousands of OPC-compliant products. In addition to a wide range of industrial members, the participation of technical leaders is notable, including Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, IBM and SAP.
The most recent addition, OPC Foundation Field Level Communications Initiative, is modernizing the most basic industrial communications with mainstream computing and IoT data concepts.
OPC Day International 2022 featured 32 presentations over 5 days covering real-world applications and ongoing developments; the following are some I found particularly interesting.
L’Oréal leverages OPC UA
Mariatou Sagna Biaré, filling and packing corporate manager of L’Oréal S.A., the French personal care company, gave a great presentation describing its application at the OPC Days 2022, and explained the positive results achieved implementing its Operation 4.0 initiative. Standardizing on OPC UA, L’Oréal is harmonizing its machine-to-machine (M2M) and IT/operational technology (OT) communications with more than 430 machines connected worldwide. She cited one of the big gains has been an increase of overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) of 2-10%. To see more details about the application, read the case study.
OPC UA energy transformation role
Espen Krogh, CEO at Prediktor described the need for significant expansion of energy systems to meet the challenges of growing demand and achieving climate goals including the role of OPC UA in energy. OPC UA provides a standard means to coordinate and optimize multiple sources of energy generation including traditional, wind, and solar. The goal being pursued is a set of OPC UA companion specifications for energy transition that will be used across thousands of energy projects.
Carbon capture and storage (CCS) value chain
Erik Skjetne, equinor and Kadri Umay, Microsoft described using OPC UA in the Norwegian government’s world’s first open source CO2, transport and storage Northern Lights project (Figure 1) designed to provide a service to industrial emitters who can now take action on emissions that can’t be avoided. The project transports captured carbon (CO2) emissions produced from the use of fossil fuels in electricity generation and industrial processes and permanently stores them underground.
Building automation
Rainer Strobel, PGMM and Dr.-Ing. Ulrich Möhl, LEA Lean Energy Services described the architecture of an environmental energy systems using OPC UA at the IN-Campus in Ingolstadt. Germany. IN-Campus GmbH (Figure 2) is a joint venture between the city of Ingolstadt and Audi AG investing in a campus with a focus on technologies of the future.
Using a large fluid loop with multiple heating and cooling sources to satisfy building environmental requirements requires uniform digital information exchanges to conserve and optimize energy while maintaining occupant comfort requirements. Information from field-level devices is integrated into OPC UA messaging (Figure 3) for the automation and management levels of the building automation system (BAS).
OPC UA over MQTT
OPC UA PubSub is an extension of OPC UA that enables communication between OPC UA applications using a publish-subscribe message pattern instead of the request-response message pattern. The publish-subscribe message pattern decouples senders of messages from their receivers, which allows the development of systems based on middleware such as an MQTT broker. UA PubSub is a generic mechanism designed to work over any message-based middleware including MQTT for bandwidth-constrained networks. OPC UA PubSub provides a complete solution that includes support for multiple protocols including binary and JSON encodings with end-to-end security. Standard configuration information model and file format integrated with OPC UA information models provide continuity simplifying configuration and application engineering.
Field Level Communications Initiative
The Field Level Communications (FLC) Initiative emphasized that OPC UA FX continues to make rapid progress to modernize the most basic industrial communications with mainstream computing data concepts to the industrial edge including sensors, actuators, and all from field devices (Figure 4). OPC UA FX is the first IP field device approach incorporating semantic contextual data connectivity.
Notable developments
Controller-to-controller, controller-to-device, and device-to-device: The upcoming release of the OPC UA FX specifications (Figure 5) focus on controller-to-controller (C2C) communications, and draft specifications used for prototyping and creation of test specifications. These lay foundation for specification enhancements for controller-to-device (C2D) and device-to-device (D2D) use cases. There is ongoing work on the OPC UA Safety Stack and extensions for C2D for safety.
Advanced physical layer. OPC UA FX is supporting Ethernet advanced physical layer (APL) two-wire Ethernet for process automation and hazardous locations, based on IEEE and IEC standards with preparations for APL testing in OPCF Certification Lab.
TSN: The working groups intends to closely align with the TSN Profile for Industrial Automation (TSN-IA-Profile), which will be standardized by the IEC/IEEE 60802 standardization group. This will help ensure that a single, converged TSN network approach is maintained so that OPC UA can share one common multi-vendor TSN network infrastructure with other applications.
This collaboration contributes toward end user confidence that 60802-compliant devices from different manufacturers, supporting different automation protocols, will interoperate reliably at the TSN level on shared networks, including devices using TSN for applications other than automation. For convenience, the collaboration activities will be referred to as “TIACC” (TSN Industrial Automation Conformance Collaboration). The first edition of the IEC/IEEE 60802 TSN specification is expected to be available to the market in late 2023.
Cloud library: The OPC Foundation globally available UA Cloud Library co-developed with the Clean Energy and Smart Manufacturing Innovation Institute (CESMII) has grown:
- More than 250 active users
- More than 65 information models including AutoID, DEXPI, MDIS, and MTConnect
- All VDMA companion specifications.
The UA Cloud Library makes OPC UA information models available in the cloud on a global scale providing users an efficient way to find and use OPC models (Figure 6).
“Users can access to all known OPC UA information models via an open, global, single-source of truth,” said Stefan Hoppe, OPC Foundation president and executive director. “Beyond the value the UA Cloud Library brings to applications, it will help with global OPC UA information model coordination and harmonization efforts by making it easy to search and cross-reference the latest OPC UA companion specifications in real-time. Finally, the UA Cloud Library will serve a crucial infrastructure role in Smart Manufacturing initiatives that depend on interoperability."
More information
OPC Day International 2022 virtual event prestation recordings and PDF presentations are available online, free of charge. Also, see the event videos.
About The Author
Bill Lydon brings more than 10 years of writing and editing expertise to Automation.com, plus more than 25 years of experience designing and applying technology in the automation and controls industry. Lydon started his career as a designer of computer-based machine tool controls; in other positions, he applied programmable logic controllers (PLCs) and process control technology. In addition to working at various large companies (e.g., Sundstrand, Johnson Controls, and Wago), Lydon served a two-year stint as part of a five-person task group, where he designed controls, automation systems, and software for chiller and boiler plant optimization. He was also a product manager for a multimillion-dollar controls and automation product line and president of an industrial control software company.
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