Stefan Hoppe, President of the OPC Foundation, opened the press conference with a summary of the past year. In the past year alone, the Foundation has grown from around 850 to 895 members worldwide. Hoppe: "This means we offer the world's largest eco-system for interoperability and a neutral ground in automation." In the area of information models, the Foundation released a total of twelve Companion Specifications in 2022 and launched five new groups. In particular, Hoppe highlights the 'Power Consumption' group, in which the PNO, ODVA, VDMA and the OPC Foundation are developing a new interface standard for recording energy consumption data in industrial production based on OPC UA.

Will OPC UA become the cloud standard?

Visibly surprised by the response himself, Hoppe talks about the rapid adaptation of OPC UA over MQTT directly from the automation devices: "Last year, we connected controllers from Beckhoff and Siemens directly to the Microsoft Azure Dashboard. This year, we are showing 17 different manufacturers who have now implemented this."

Even more important, however, is the native connection to cloud providers: After Microsoft Azure, the next cloud giant is now following with AWS. "It's only a matter of time," says Hoppe, "before other cloud giants follow suit."

OPC UA FX specifications available

Following the launch of the Field Level Communications (FLC) initiative at SPS 2018, Peter Lutz, Director FLC, has now announced the release of the specifications. "We consider the release of the first version of the UAFX specification and an extensive multi-vendor live demo to be a great success. Thanks to the extensive prototyping, the specifications are already so mature that products can be realized directly and conformity tests can be carried out." Hoppe praised the work and pointed out that the OPC UA FX extensions close the gap in standardized horizontal controller-2-controller communication as a first step and are already referenced as a technological basis by other organizations such as the Open Process Automation Forum (OPAF). The OPAF is dedicated to the development of standard-based, open, security-oriented, interoperable process control architectures.

Working group for security

The Industrial Ethernet Security Harmonization Group (IESHG) also deals with the topic of security. The working group, which was set up by the standardization organizations OPC Foundation, PI, ODVA and FieldComm, regularly discusses security issues in the context of industrial automation. The aim is to harmonize the security concepts of Industrial Ethernet so that end users of the protocols have less complexity when using security in their automation systems. The IESHG has now produced a first white paper to shed light on various topics of security concepts in industrial automation environments. A FAQ explains general concepts ranging from public key infrastructures to various types of SDO certificates and certificate management tools.

Out of the complexity

"SMEs can no longer find their way through the zoo of standards and initiatives" complains Hoppe - hardly anyone can explain without problems where the administration shell is, what the difference is to the digital twin or the difference between AAS submodels and companion specs. "Users are overwhelmed by all the terms and organizations - how are technicians supposed to get excited about new approaches if they first have to plough their way through a jumble of terminology?" The OPC Foundation is therefore working with other organizations to draft a simple 'Big Picture Interoperability' position paper. This is so important right now, in an "exciting time in which IT and OT are increasingly coming together". And for 2023, Hoppe announces: "Industrial interoperability using OPC UA will grow into other areas of IT." Companies from the fields of AI, big data and data rooms are highly aware that OPC UA represents the world's largest pool of standardized information in the automation world.

The OPC Foundation at SPS 2022: Hall 5, Stand 140