Articles and News

In this position, the Chair manages the strategic and tactical directives of the Board of Directors and ensures the marketing, technical, and overall business activities of the OPC Foundation consistently align with its vision and objectives.

By Bill Lydon, Editor, Automation.com The industrial automation industry has a reputation and history of being behind the technology adoption curve. With an prganizational need for reliability and system availability, the key question is: When is a new technology reliable enough that the benefits outweigh the risk?

Purpose-built for Windows and LINUX edge devices using standard industrial protocols, such as MQTT, OPC-UA, OPC-DA and Modbus, Aspen Edge Connect software collects real-time data from multiple assets and pools it together for analysis with edge processing devices.

Factories of the future will demand advanced circuit protection technology to keep everything connected.

The company outlines the technologies available, and the value in using them, in its new industrial internet of things (IIoT) whitepaper.

The two companies have decided to extend their existing agreement, to further develop their joint business cooperation and commercial initiatives.

Beckhoff will exhibit in the Integrated Automation, Motion & Drives (IAMD) USA section in booth 134417. During the show, Beckhoff will also support the EtherCAT Technology Group (ETG) at partner booth 134117.

By Bill Lydon, Editor, Automation.com The industrial automation industry has dramatically lagged in the adoption of technology, and a major reason for this has been closed ecosystems. Will the Honeywell TDC3000 migration approach eliminate the reason for The Open Process Automation Forum (OPA) initiative?

By Larry Smentowski, Rockwell Automation Smart manufacturing or Industry 4.0 initiatives present an opportunity to help all automakers address their challenges. But those initiatives will only be successful if automakers first have network, control and software standards in place.

CLPA’s activity with the OPCF aims to expand its existing CSP+ (Control & Communication System Profile) technology from just describing individual devices and to apply it to complete machines and production lines. This is the key concept behind CSP+ for Machine.

By Bill Lydon, Editor, Automation.com The automation industry lost a dedicated and creative professional in Dr. Kenneth (Ken) Ryan, who died in July. Ken was an amazing man with a wide scope of knowledge and interests that he enthusiastically pursued.

By Bill Lydon, Editor, Automation.com Throughout the four-day event, which hosted over 21,000 attendees from more than 100 countries, it was obvious that SAP is focused on growing its role to encompass all manufacturing functions outside of design and hard real-time control.

The International Society of Automation and The Open Group have agreed to a liaison Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to facilitate cooperation in advancing and harmonizing the development of a multivendor, interoperable, secure control architecture for application across the process industries. Activities will include sharing of best practices, document review and joint forums.

By Bill Lydon, Editor, Automation.com Much like the Fieldbus wars that marked the industrial automation industry of the 1990’s, there are early-warning signs of competing standards developing in TSN activity that could ignite a similar wave of chaos.

The Open Group Houston 2018 - Digital Transformation in the Energy Industry - will bring together vendors and end user organizations to discuss the development of standards-based and interoperable architecture, with a particular focus on technical and business issues for process automation.

Integration Objects’ OPC UA .NET Client toolkit is a collection of libraries, classes and interfaces that allows programming of OPC UA Client applications using .NET framework

By Bob McIlvride, Skkynet Cloud Systems SDKs tend to be collections of reference implementations, wrappers, helper classes, and sample applications aimed at giving you a head-start for building your UA app. Developers with experience in OPC UA find these tools indispensable. The problem is, in the end, they still need to build it.

The OPC UA Vision companion specification is now available free of charge as VDMA Specification number 40100 (as release candidate version). The OPC UA Robotics companion specification is now available free of charge as VDMA Specification number 40010 (as draft version).

Together with member companies, the Machine Vision, Integrated Assembly Solutions and Robotics groups are developing vendor- independent information models: In this way, the machines will speak the same language in the future.

Resembling more a bustling city than a trade fair, the 71st Hannover Messe was very busy and chock full of energy and innovation this year, with over 200,000 attendees from 75 countries. Focusing on the theme 'Integrated Industry – Connect & Collaborate', the Digital Factory was front and center.