April 27, 2018 -- At HANNOVER MESSE 2018, more than 20 international organizations and industry vendors jointly announced the "Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) + OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA)" smart manufacturing testbed covering six major industrial Internet scenarios. The stakeholders engaged in the testbed include the Alliance of Industrial Internet (AII), Avnu Alliance, Edge Computing Consortium (ECC), Fraunhofer FOKUS, Huawei, Schneider Electric, HollySys, National Instruments Corporation (NI), B&R Automation, TTTech, and Spirent Communications. Huawei's TSN switches provide and low-latency industrial control network for the testbed.
At the event, the testbed was demonstrated by simulating a range of real-life smart manufacturing conditions to show its technical highlight -- TSN + OPC UA, which is the major driving force for new technologies such as predictive maintenance, data analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence (AI).
Smart manufacturing requires flexible production systems and cross-platform, cross-industry applications, however this demands large-scale real-time industrial communications networks which present significant challenges for operators.
Launched at the HANNOVER MESSE 2018, the testbed complies with the OPC UA standards, ensuring that multiple devices from different vendors can collaborate with each other in a single system. The TSN testbed integrates Software-Defined Networking (SDN) technology to prioritize traffic based on precise timing and transmit both real-time and non-real-time data over a single network. This enables connectivity and interoperability for machines, people, and things across the entire network and bridges the last mile for the industrial Internet.
Huawei and several other pioneers have established the smart manufacturing testbed for six industrial Internet scenarios: TSN for Predictive Maintenance (by Huawei and AII), Motor Synchronization (by Huawei and NI), Racing-Car Game (by Huawei and HollySys), Plotter Motion Control (by Huawei and Linmot), LED synchronization (by Huawei and Schneider Electric), and OPC UA over TSN (by Huawei and B&R Automation). This testbed verifies the highly deterministic and low-latency nature of the TSN network in complex environments, and ensures strict synchronous motion control in industrial scenarios. Spirent Communication's test devices were used to generate TSN and non-TSN traffic, to prove the benefits brought by new industrial network architecture and services.
Huawei works with global partners to develop more digital industrial solutions for customers, making it possible to build new operational processes and infrastructural platforms for Industry 4.0.
