Articles and News

By Bill Lydon The impact of open manufacturing initiatives continues to be a worldwide affair. These initiatives continue to grow as industry recognizes the need to modernize and the Industry 4.0 movement (called “Industrie 4.0” in Germany, its country of origin) continues to accelerate.

OPC UA is an industrial, protocol-agnostic framework for the Industrial Internet of Things and Industrie 4.0 that contains mechanisms for secure, reliable, manufacturer and platform-independent information exchange, as well as options for semantic information modeling and self-description of devices.

This specification describes a standardized OPC UA object model for PROFINET devices which enables PROFINET devices from a wide variety of different manufacturers to transfer device data to asset management systems in a standardized way, for example. Standardization makes information collection significantly easier for tool manufacturers, regardless of the manufacturer, but this is just the beginning of PI’s vertical integration strategy.

Device libraries have been a common problem for many field communicators, and the complicated update procedure has been a nightmare for many users. Vendors sometimes struggle to understand what really happens in the field, and the chat groups on WhatsApp prove that the challenges still exist out there.

PRM centralizes management of large volumes of data from instrumentation and equipment.and fully supports communication standards such as HART, FOUNDATION fieldbus™ (FF-H1), PROFIBUS, PROFINET, ISA100 and FDT/DTM (Field Device Tool/Device Type Manager4) interface standards

The FDT ecosystem is evolving to incorporate modern web-based and mobile applications in the process, hybrid and discrete manufacturing markets.

Learn from an interview with Darek Kominek of Matrikon about the concepts of built-in security, the IT-OT gap, protecting against hacker/malware attacks, and many other features that have made OPC UA the secure data-exchange standard it is today. his is the third in the series of OPC Experts Interviews.

The FDT 3.0 standard is intended to accelerate the evolutionary journey into the Fourth Industrial Revolution by enabling an ecosystem of FDT-based solutions to meet demands for IIoT and Industrie 4.0 applications.

By James McQuiggan Ransomware is no longer a hit and run type of attack. The criminals are utilizing phishing and other social engineering techniques to gain access to the IT network and pivoting through to the OT networks to copy and exfiltrate the data. It’s only a matter of time before criminal organizations are able to gain access to more OT facilities and organizations.

Learn how the science of the open platform communication standard, OPC UA, is applied across the industrial automation sector from an interview with Uwe Steinkrauss, CEO of Unified Automation. This is the second in the series of OPC Experts Interviews.

FDT and ODVA share a common core mission that includes advancing open, interoperable information and communication exchange for the industrial automation marketplace.

Based in Irving, TX, Flowserve has been a member of FDT Group and a participant on the organization’s technical working groups, and recently upgraded its membership to “Sponsor” status and assumed roles on both the FDT Board of Directors and Executive Committee.

The Open Industry 4.0 Alliance, which was launched at that time, currently has 55 members. In the meantime, four working groups have come together to develop concrete use cases for each of the industry segments and technologies.

The OPC Experts Interview is a series taking a deep dive into open platform communications, OPC/OPC UA and related technology. This interview is with Stefan Hoppe, President and Executive Director of the OPC Foundation.

Mr. Stefan Hoppe, President and Executive Director, selected Mr. Clark to serve in this capacity, to support OPC North American membership, and to function as a spokesperson for the Foundation throughout the region.

The latest enhancements to The EtherNet/IP Specification provide network diagnostics, methods to lower bandwidth and resource requirements for devices, and the addition of IIoT building block infrastructure.

The partners in this group are pursuing the goal of driving the development of SPE further forward for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and may branch out to other areas as well. The System Alliance has now also been joined by Datwyler, Kyland, Microchip Technology, Rosenberger, SICK, O-Ring, Draka/Prysmian Group, and University 4 Industry.

Moxa joins an array of companies that have already become Platinum members of the OpenChain Project, including ARM Holdings, Bosch, Cisco, Comcast, Facebook, Fujitsu, Google, Hitachi, Microsoft, Panasonic, Qualcomm, Siemens, Sony, Toshiba, Toyota, Uber, and Western Digital.

The collaboration between ODVA and the OPC Foundation will result in secure communications between devices that are a part of a CIP-enabled Industrial Control System (ICS) and other OPC UA enabled applications allowing communication between CIP devices and OPC UA devices as well as with cloud and enterprise level services.

The company has been driving the creation of a Single Pair Ethernet standard for the Industrial marketplace since 2015 along with other industrial companies and global standards bodies, such IEC and IEEE.