Industrial Automation Connectivity Activity Open Source or Not
I have been writing about some open source initiatives with OPC UA. I think it’s cool and long overdue that there is so much happening in the OPC world lately. See these:
Open Source OPC UA Development
Open Source OPC UA for Manufacturing
Last week at Hannover, the OPC Foundation announced several items—including the promotion of Stefan Hoppe to Vice President of the Foundation (pictured). Another one deals with an open (sort of) source initiative designed to broaden the appeal of OPC outside of the industrial automation community.
OPC Announces “OPC UA Open Shared Source” Strategy
The OPC Foundation announced that the OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA) specifications and technology will be made available to companies, consortiums, and end users without requiring membership in the OPC Foundation. The OPC Foundation is implementing an “open shared source” strategy to facilitate widespread adoption of the technology beyond industrial automation.
OPC UA provides a complete solution for information modeling allowing consortiums and vendors to plug in their simple or complex information models directly into OPC UA and take advantage of all of the OPC UA SOA allowing generic devices and applications to seamlessly share information.
The OPC Foundation open shared source strategy provides developers a quick jump start on the technology enabling prototyping projects without any barriers.
The OPC Foundation vision of interoperability providing the best specifications, technology, certification and process is the core of this open shared source strategy for the technology and specifications. The open shared source will be hosted on open source collaboration community work space. The OPC Foundation OPC UA stacks available to the OPC Foundation members will be under RCL license, allowing OPC Foundation members to build the highest quality OPC UA enabled products and then be able to certify the products through the comprehensive OPC Foundation certification and interoperability programs.
Stefan Hoppe, OPC Foundation Vice President, commented that “Adoption of OPC standards in industrial automation and specifically reaching out to other domains requires new ways of thinking to evangelize and increase awareness about the OPC Technology. OPC Unified Architecture is becoming the dominant infrastructure and information modeling architecture for the Internet of things and Industry 4.0, and these initiatives require complete transparency and open this about the technology to be a core part of their infrastructure.”
Continuing the Conversation
Andy Robinson pointed to a neat little app on OPC on YouTube. I replied and that led to a cool conversation between Andy and Rick Bulotta of ThingWorx. Here is what a nice little conversation can happen on Twitter. I’d like to invite more of these.
Andy Robinson @archestranaut @garymintchell re OPCUA, thought you might be interested in this. It’s a small start but the vision is great! http://ow.ly/LWdXq
Then Rick Bullota chimed in:
Rick Bullotta @RickBullotta why introduce #MQTT into the mix? it is a weak subset of OPCUA (no metadata, RPC, discovery)? #IoT
Andy Robinson @archestranaut 100% for typical in the building plant floor apps. But for weak or expensive connectivity may be better.
Rick Bullotta @RickBullotta living with “all of the above” here @Thingworx. MQTT is more like OPC (actually, NetDDE) than OPCUA.#IoT
Andy Robinson @archestranaut also agree #mqtt maybe not ideal for commands as would probably require Qos2, not a huge deal…
Rick Bullotta @RickBullotta btw, I think it’s quite cool what you did though! nice work!
Andy Robinson @archestranaut not my work. Someone else.
Andy Robinson @archestranaut but I do think the basic idea of accepting not many new #IOT device will speak UA out of box leads us to .. . think about how we might integrate at least a subset of critical info into our already setup SCADA systems.
Andy Robinson @archestranaut I don’t suspect folks like Thingworx are looking to supplant traditional SCADA. At least doesn’t seem logical
Rick Bullotta @RickBullotta we’re already doing this with @ThingWorx via OPC/OPCUA, historians, HMI APIs, databases, and so on.
Andy Robinson @archestranaut which is why you will be fine while other “similar” offerings will disappear on the low end
Rick Bullotta @RickBullotta correct. connecting, augmenting integrating and expanding their reach, whether within the plant or beyond.
Rick Bullotta @RickBullotta been there, done that, twice. 😉 I also founded Lighthammer (now SAP MII).
Andy Robinson @archestranaut nice to have a more civil convo after the last mini-twitp*** of about a month ago with others. 🙂
