Industrial Edge
OPC UA for the Field Level: UAFX multi-vendor demo SOURCE: OPC FOUNDATION
OPC UA is establishing itself as an industrial interoperability standard not only for the vertical integration from the control level to the edge or up to the cloud, but also as an interface for exchanging process data between controllers regardless of which protocol communicates with underlying field devices.
The OPC UA FX Multi-Vendor Demo shows the interaction of controllers and network infrastructure components from different vendors to exchange process data at the field level. THE FIELD LEVEL COMMUNICATIONS (FLC) initiative of the OPC Foundation was launched to establish OPC UA as a uniform, consistent and vendor-independent industrial interoperability solution also at the field level. To this end, extensions to the OPC UA framework are being specified that standardize the semantics and behavior of controllers and field devices from different manufacturers, both for discrete manufacturing and for the process industry. Three and a half years after its launch, the initiative has completed the final release candidate of the first specification version,
which is being named OPC UA Field eXchange (FX). This first specification has the focus on cross-vendor controller-to-controller use cases that support flexible and reconfigurable processing and manufacturing operations. A multi-vendor demo was created to test the interaction of UAFX controller prototypes that exchange process data on the basis of OPC UA and the OPC UA FX extensions.
Application example
To illustrate the application of OPC UA FX an example is given in the following: A machine
operator buys two identical machine tools from manufacturer 1 and two identical robots from manufacturer 2 to automate the loading and unloading of the machine tools. To control and synchronize the processes between the machine tool and the robot, the respective controllers must exchange defined process data with each other. Neither the machine tool nor the robot changes its function or operation after installation, but there is no pre-planning of which machine will be connected to which robot, and possibly the network identification of the different controllers is not defined in advance.
OPC UA FX Specifications (Parts 80-84) 08.202 2
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