Articles and News

OPC Days 2020, a virtual event held June 22- 25, provided the latest information about OPC UA (Open Platform Communications United Architecture), the protocol-agnostic framework for the Industrial Internet of Things and Industry 4.0 initiatives.

By Bill Lydon Open system options continue to emerge from nontraditional suppliers and standards groups, and this is a trend that I expect will accelerate and enable multivendor interoperability at all levels of the system architecture.

By Bill Lydon The Process Automation industry has been heavily impacted by the influx of new technologies and, as we enter the next decade, several organizations are providing roadmaps in order to help process automation companies enable the best practices to leverage these technologies and drive competitiveness and productivity forward.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Buhler, a provider of grain milling solutions, standardized on Softing’s industry-hardened S7/S5 OPC Server to provide reliable connectivity between Buhler’s “WinCoS.r2” automation system and multiple S7-400 PLC’s

From 2020 to 2022 almost 2 million new units of industrial robots are expected to be installed in factories around the world. New technology trends and market developments enable companies to react to changing requirements. The International Federation of Robotics shows top trends to innovate.

Announced in conjunction with the availability of version 1.2 of the FDI specifications (IEC 62769), this release of the FDI Device Package Integrated Development Environment (FDI-IDE) provides enhancements for field instrument software developers.

The initiative "Industrial Joining Technologies (IJT)" describes all joining technologies used for manufacturing processes such as riveting, welding, gluing and tightening. The scope of the specification was developed with the help of DIN 8580 and shows which joining processes can be classified under Industrial Joining Technologies (see figure).

The Open Industry 4.0 Alliance acts as a partnership of industrial companies that pragmatically participate in the implementation of cross-vendor industry 4.0 solutions and services for manufacturing facilities and automated warehouses.

DataHub middleware from Skkynet was used by ABB to support redundant, secure networking of OPC A&E and real-time data on the Trans-Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline (TANAP) project in Turkey.

Pepperl+Fuchs Comtrol and Callisto work with each manufacturing customer to deliver initial solutions that have tangible results, and then collect more data from more sources, provide more insight and analysis, roll out to more manufacturing lines and plants, and provide a roadmap to a full manufacturing execution system for true automation.

As part of a joint project, members of the VDMA OPC Machine Vision Initiative together with the OPC UA Foundation, have developed a hardware demonstrator that includes the practical implementation of the "OPC UA for Machine Vision (OPC MV) Part 1 Companion Specification".