Articles and News

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.

By Bob McIlvride, Skkynet Cloud Systems Kaspersky Labs used common exploit-discovery techniques to identify 17 critical security flaws in the OPC UA software they were testing. There is no reason to doubt their methodology, but we all need to be careful about the conclusions that we reach.

The OPC Foundation is committed to addressing all issues as they arise, to working with OPC vendors to ensure that software is patched, and to notifying OPC users about the issues and the fixes.

While serial bus systems will continue to play an important role in the future, solutions based on Industrial Ethernet are becoming increasingly common with Industry 4.0 applications. The focus is less on cable measurements, signal levels or signal shapes, but in the case of standards such as PROFINET, utilization and the greatest possible availability of the networks are the focus of interest.

By Bill Lydon, Editor, Automation.com At Hannover Messe 2018, it was clear that many in the computing industry are focused on implementing a holistic cyber security approach, encompassing the entire architecture including cloud, enterprise, and edge devices. This article will explore some of these efforts and explain how they are shaping the future of cybersecurity in industrial automation.

This will allow users to directly connect EtherCAT slave devices and entire networks to heterogeneous TSN domains without any change or modification to the EtherCAT devices.

At Hannover Fair 2018, the vision for a seamless architecture from edge devices to enterprise and cloud computing was a prominent theme. Numerous product demonstrations, announcements, and discussions promoted the combination of Time Sensitive Networking (TSN IEEE 802.1) with OPC UA messaging and data models to create a new manufacturing and production architecture

Under the moderation of the OPC Foundation, the concept of the I4AAS, defined in a technology independent manner so far, will be mapped into the technology of OPC UA.

VDW has joined in the common pursuit of establishing an open, consistent, OPC UA based method for multi-vendor and multi-generation machines to share context rich data between each other and with broader enterprise and cloud based IT infrastructures.