Articles and News

By Michael LaGrega, Siemens Data gathered by RFID readers can be a critical element in a corporation’s plans to gain increased visibility and understanding of parts, materials and other moveable assets. All of this valuable information can be integrated more easily when standards like OPC-UA with its AutoID companion are employed.

This specification describes the mapping of the Sercos device model and the Sercos device profiles to OPC UA, so that functions and parameters of Sercos devices are made accessible via OPC UA in a vendor-independent manner.

By Andrew McIntyre, Texas Instruments At the core of Industry 4.0 is the need for reliable communication networks. These networks are closely tied to real-time operational needs; therefore, they must be able to handle information in a deterministic and redundant manner.

The goal of the conference, which took place on 28th June 2017 at the National Conference Centre in Birmingham,was to expand the horizons for OPC users and systems integrators by improving their knowledge and understanding of OPC technologies, as well as giving attendees an opportunity to view real-world demonstrations of cutting-edge applications for OPC and industrial data

By Bob McIlvride, Skkynet Cloud Systems More and more companies are recognizing the value hidden in their process data, and are looking at ways to tap into it. If you need to provide access to OPC data on your plant system, say for analytics, predictive maintenance, or real-time dashboards, you'll need to secure your system from the kind of threat that WannaCry poses

Panacea Update Manager automates the process of deploying Microsoft patches on industrial networks by allowing only automation vendor approved patches to be deployed on the appropriate computers.

By John Rinaldi, Real Time Automation In their latest series of announcements, it’s clear that OPC UA is key to Microsoft’s strategy of entering and dominating the factory floor through its Azure cloud services.

By Stefan Hoppe, OPC Foundation In November 2016, the Industrie 4.0 Platform published a checklist for classifying and advertising products as Industrie 4.0 “Basic,” “Ready,” or “Full”. To comply with the “Industrie 4.0 communication” criterion, even the lowest category requires the product to be addressable over the network via TCP/UDP or IP and to integrate at least the OPC UA information model.

Over two days, Festo's course will assist leaders to identify opportunities for change within their own workplaces and help them recognise how and where to apply the principles of Industry 4.0.

By Jan Pingel & Matthew Burd, Honeywell Process Solutions One of the most important characteristics of a connected plant is the ability to increase and enhance collaboration to help solve previously unsolvable problems. The emergence of the cloud-based historian is a key component, therefore, to bringing the connected plant to life because it greatly enables this type of collaboration.

By Jonathan Wilkins, EU Automation The combination of data from multiple platforms is now possible because of the OPC UA protocol - an in-demand feature - as the Internet of Things (IoT) gains traction. This article discusses how the open source protocol OPC UA is beneficial for automation.

Mr. van Vuuren has been certified as a Certified Licensing Professional, and is currently in charge of service sales in the EMEA and APAC regions for Silicon Valley-based Harmonic, and will be a valuable asset in assisting Skkynet with complex partnership and sales negotiations.

Comtrol’s IO-Link Masters are available in three industrial Ethernet protocols: EtherNet/IP, Modbus TCP and PROFINET IO, which are all capable of running OPC UA with MultiLink.

Kepware and Microsoft’s industrial IoT solutions integrate with the help of OPC UA. KEPServerEX can move industrial control data to the Azure cloud platform by utilizing both OPC UA and MQTT via the Azure IoT Gateway SDK and Azure IoT Hub.

By Alex West, IHS Markit Overall, a number of themes could be discerned at HANNOVER MESSE this year, including cost-cutting, production efficiency, downtime reduction, quicker time-to-market, product customization, and lower development costs.

The specification provides device manufacturers with an official foundation to implement EtherCAT P technology, which enables data and power transmission on a single, standard cable.

The OPC Foundation European Certification lab has successfully been accredited and the first successful certified product was a Siemens RFID reader.

Microsoft has provided, in conjunction with the OPC Foundation, an set of sample applications, inclusive of reference clients, reference servers, an aggregation server, an OPC classic wrapper and a web application to quickly display OPC UA telemetry data sent to the cloud.

By Bill Lydon, Editor, Automation.com We've received a number of comments and questions from vendors about The Open Group's effort to push for open process automation standards. Tn the aim of encouraging more discussion on the topic, we're sharing some of these questions in order to provide some more clarity on its importance.

The target is to offer TSN as firmware upgrade to the users of netX technologies. Hilscher developed a firmware upgrade for TSN which can turn a standard real-time ethernet device into a TSN enabled device.