Technology
UA Cloud Library and Field Level Communications Updates The OPC Foundation continues to forge ahead with technology advancements. Recent highlights include the launch of the UA Cloud Library developed in conjunction with CESMII and completion of the second release candidate for the OPC UA FX (Field eXchange) specifications that is part of the FLC initiative.
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SOURCE: OPC FOUNDATION
Semantic interoperability with OPC UA from the sensor to the cloud
External World Management Level Planning Level Source: VDI (2013), MDPI (2019)
THE UA CLOUD LIBRARY MAKES IT EASIER than ever to find, share, explore, and use OPC UA Information Models by applications, end-users, and standards bodies. The globally available UA Cloud Library was co-developed with the Clean Energy and Smart Manufacturing Innovation Institute (CESMII). With its multi-cloud architecture, the UA Cloud Library saw contributions from all major cloud vendors leveraging open interfaces and is available for sharing, finding, and collaborating on OPC UA Information Models. Today, the UA Cloud Library already contains over 65 OPC UA Information Models created by individual companies as well as international standards organizations like AutoID, DEXPI, MDIS, MTConnect, and over 30 VDMA working groups as part of their OPC UA Companion Specification work. The UA Cloud Library offers two standout benefits: • OPC UA information model access for applications • Ease of use of the entire OPC UA Companion Specification collection for end-users in general While shop floor (OT) components routinely discover and use data structures and services of other OPC UA components, direct access to such semantic information has not been readily available to cloud-based applications due to security considerations. The UA Cloud Library eliminates this gap by providing IT and cloud-based applications access to semantic information directly from the cloud instead of manually getting it from the OT systems. “The UA Cloud Library is the missing link that makes OPC UA information models available in the cloud on a global scale without requiring a connection to physical machines,” said Erich Barnstedt, Chief Architect Standards & Consortia, Microsoft Corporation, and chair of the UA Cloud Library working group. “It enables OPC UA Information Models – used as blueprints for industrial digital twins – to be looked up and matched against time-series machine telemetry data provided by cloudbased analytics software, which is a common requirement in Industrial IoT projects.” “It was an honor to partner with the OPC Foundation in this strategic initiative,” said John Dyck, CEO of CESMII. “The UA Cloud Library is truly an important step
Supervisory Level
L4 L3 L2
Control Level
L1
Field Level
L0
Smart Automation Device
Network segments Function
IT-related OT-related
The UA Cloud Library makes is easy to find, share, explore, and use OPC UA Information Models by applications, end-users, and standards bodies. on the journey to Smart Manufacturing Interoperability and will pave the way for dramatic simplification and cost savings for manufacturing systems!” Stefan Hoppe, President and Executive Director of the OPC Foundation, said that “the value of what the OPC Foundation and CESMII joint working group created cannot be overstated because it equips us with the mechanism needed to facilitate access to all known OPC UA information models via an open, global, single-source of truth.” “Beyond the value the UA Cloud Library brings to applications, it will help with global OPC UA information model coordination and harmonization efforts by making it easy to search and cross-reference the latest OPC UA companion specifications in real-time. Finally, the UA Cloud Library will serve a crucial infrastructure role in Smart Manufacturing initiatives that depend on interoperability.”
FLC Initiative reaches milestone
Three years after its launch, the OPC Foundation’s Field Level Communications (FLC) initiative has completed the second release candidate of the OPC UA FX (Field eXchange) specifications and has started the review and release process for them. In addition, a multivendor demo with controllers and network
infrastructure components of 20 companies – among them the world’s largest automation suppliers – has been realized to showcase the cross-vendor interoperability of automation components for the most diverse use cases in Factory and Process Automation. OPC Foundation (OPCF) announced that its Field Level Communications Initiative has accomplished a significant milestone in the ongoing project by completing and publishing the second OPC UA FX specification release candidate that will become the first public available specification after conducting OPCF-wide membership review. The release candidate of the Field Level Communications Initiative consists of four specification parts (Parts 80-83) and focuses on communication between automation components to exchange process data and configuration data using OPC UA Client/ Server and PubSub extensions in combination with peer-to-peer connections and basic diagnostics: Part 80 (OPC 10000-80) provides an overview and introduces the basic concepts of using OPC UA for field level communications. Part 81 (OPC 10000-81) specifies the base information model and the communication concepts to meet the various use cases and requirements of Factory and Process
in d u s t r ial et h er ne t b o o k
02.2022
