Summer’s Over! IIoT Implementation Learning & Resources

Summary

For those of us in the northern hemisphere, summer is fading, children are returning to school, fun vacations are over and it’s back to projects. In the southern hemisphere if you’re reading this, the winter is fading and spring is coming!
 
At Software Toolbox, we’re big on continuous learning, and this summer our sharing focus was on IIoT integration. We’ve compiled a sampling of the technical learning articles that you may have missed. Put the learning opportunities to work for your IIOT & Digital Transformation projects.

How to secure MQTT data access beyond encryption

MQTT is a powerful technology that in the USA and Canada have been extensively implemented in OT/IT/Cloud integration applications. You probably know this but to be sure, in MQTT, you have clients and brokers. Devices and software applications are MQTT clients, and they can publish data, and subscribe to receive data changes. They publish that data to MQTT Brokers which allows for efficient many to many data exchange. 


 
The main function of a MQTT Broker is to act as a central hub of information, managing the flow of data across various connected clients. The decoupled nature of MQTT communications allows devices to operate individually of each other without the need of being online at the same time to exchange data, or even know about each other, or communicate directly between them in a many to many architectures. They simply publish or subscribe to relevant topics as needed and the broker handles the details.
 
Now, what if certain topics hold sensitive information that only certain users should have access to? Sure MQTT allows for encrypted data transmission but typically, if a client is connected with valid permissions to the Broker, it can easily find all the available topics maintained on the Broker. But what if you need to granularly control access to that data or even discover it?

Learn how to secure MQTT data access.
 

Integrating non-PLC devices to cloud with MQTT

There's a wide variety of solutions for integrating popular PLCs, controls and DCS with MQTT and the cloud. But what about the myriad of devices that exist in all industrial operations, that show up with a serial or ethernet port, but connecting to them requires special software from the manufacturer, or worse writing custom code. 
 
We’re talking about food/beverage/consumer packaged industry end of line devices like scanners, printers, labelers, weigh bridges and more. We’re talking about inspection equipment, video board displays for the shop floor. You name it, if it's not a PLC, drive or DCS, how are you going to integrate it!
 
We published an article recently that shows you how to use off-the-shelf software to visual implement the commands required communicate with those devices and then publish the data via MQTT. 


LEARN HOW: Adding MQTT to Non-Standard Control Devices
 

 Video tutorial: Delivering OT RESTful data to HiveMQ

HiveMQ is a popular broker, though it doesn’t offer the granular security that we talked about in our MQTT Security post, it is very popular and we’ve seen some very large implementations leveraging their cloud hosted, clustered solution. 
 
If you prefer video learning, this tutorial shows you how to take data from a RESTful webservice, and deliver it to HiveMQ. The methods used though can be used to also deliver OT data from OPC data sources, devices, databases, ERP & SAP systems and more to HiveMQ. 


 Watch the video.
 

Video tutorial: Integrating BACnet building automation systems to OPC UA

What about your building automation systems? They likely communicate using BACnet over Ethernet and can become part of your digital transformation as well. If managing the temperature and humidity in your production operations can affect quality yields, capacity, throughput, and you’re embarking on projects to use AI and Machine Learning to improve results, then you’ll need that data.
 
In this video tutorial, we show you how to connect to BACnet devices and expose the data via OPC UA. Once that is done, you can use techniques from our other articles to push that data to the cloud.


Watch the video. 

How OPC UA PubSub, Companion Specs can help and how to leverage them

You’ve probably used OPC for many years, and hopefully by now you’ve moved beyond OPC DA and are adopting and using OPC UA in your systems. If not, we can help with that. However, you may not be familiar with the OPC UA companion specifications, PubSub and its use of MQTT. These are heavily adopted in Europe, but we are seeing them more here through imported machinery but also as users seek to leverage all that OPC UA has to offer.
 
If you are familiar with OPC communication, you know OPC Tags typically come in the form of singular values of the typical data types, such as Booleans, Integers, Floats, and so on. However, you may not realize there are means available in OPC UA to structure data that can handle the complexities of multiple data types, that would enhance the clarity, efficiency and interoperability of your communication? 

OPC UA supports the implementation of specialized data types in the form of structures (also called complex data), which allows information of different data types to be grouped together into one node. Here’s why Complex Data matters to you:

• Complex data, or structured data, support types like arrays and structures that enable detailed data representation.
• Complex data allows for more efficient transmission of large sets of data.
• It facilitates better interoperability between systems and devices, allowing for the standardization of data models.
• Complex data enables advanced features such as historical data access and alarms, crucial for robust data management.

 
 OPC UA structures and methods can be specific to a single server or device type, or they can be formalized for common use cases. Quite often, standards and regulations within an industry create the need for the collection of similar information in similar formats in a defined data model that has been agreed upon by the customers and suppliers in that industry. OPC UA Companion specifications accommodate these needs by providing a means to implement those agreed upon industry-specific data models and use OPC UA as a standard transport method for the data. For example, EUROMAP 77 is a more well-known specification that is tailored to injection molding machines in the plastics and rubber space, that is also implemented in an OPC UA Companion Specification. PackML is another standard well know for the packaging industry that has been implemented an OPC UA Companion Specification.
 
OPC UA PubSub (Publish-Subscribe) is an extension of the OPC UA (Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture) standard that introduces a communication pattern where publishers send data to subscribers without the need for direct point-to-point connections. It enables efficient and scalable data exchange in industrial and IoT (Internet of Things) applications by decoupling data producers (publishers) from consumers (subscribers). One of the transports that OPC UA PubSub can use is MQTT, which when combined with OPC Companion Specifications delivers the structured, standardized data payload formatting that MQTT alone lacks.
 
If you want to dive into learning more about these topics, we encourage you to read the deep-dive blog our team published that explains the concepts more but also dives into the “how to."

Learn More About OPC UA Pub/Sub, Companion Specs & MQTT

Conclusions 

We hope you’ve found some of these learning opportunities helpful. They are just as sampling of what our team publishes weekly in our Software Toolbox technical blog. If you’ve read something and have questions, please contact our team. We’re not going to deliver sales pitches. We want to hear your questions, discuss your challenges and see how we can help. Since 1996, that’s the Software Toolbox Way.