"We are experiencing incredibly successful global adoption," says Stefan Hoppe, Global Vice President of the OPC Foundation, adding: "Europe is leading the way in OPC UA adoption by a wide margin - but we are seeing enthusiasm for OPC UA worldwide!" With regard to North America, Hoppe emphasizes that OPC UA is not only being used in three IIC testbeds, but that "large corporations such as Emerson and Rockwell are now also offering OPC UA products and helping the Foundation to promote this technology."

Asia catches up

But the OPC Foundation is particularly pleased with Asia. Within the next two years, it is expected that more OPC members will come from Asia and that there will be greater adoption than from North America. "In Taiwan in particular, I was impressed by the fact that OPC UA did not actually have to be promoted and is accepted as a standard - but there were dedicated questions about the VDMA information models," says Hoppe. "In Germany, the Lab Network Industrie4.0 (LNI) is the central and neutral platform for practical implementations, and a large number of breakthrough projects with OPC UA are on the way there.

In Germany, the VDMA in particular, with its 38 trade associations, is pushing the idea of OPC UA companion standards: while injection molders were the pioneers, followed by 'Machine Vision' and robotics, eleven trade associations in the VDMA are now already actively involved in the topic of OPC UA.

Companion Standards

"The real challenge of the future is to coordinate these different Companion Specs with each other so that, for example, a robot and an injection moulding machine do not have completely different MES or energy interfaces - this is synchronized by the VDMA," says Hoppe, praising the activities.

The increased adaptation also means that the OPC Lab Europe in Stuttgart, which only opened in January, is working at full capacity. Companion standards will also be certified there in future, such as the recently published 'OPC UA OPEN-SCS Standard' for serialization in the pharmaceutical sector. The OPC lab is also gearing up to offer certification for OPC UA over TSN devices as a one-stop store service in the future. "We have all the necessary partners in the Stuttgart area with whom we will offer this certification package. However, externally there is only one contact person, OPC-Laboratory, and a single invoice," says Hoppe, looking to the future, although he is also cautious: "It will still take some time before it can be realistically implemented, as neither TSN is ready nor has OPC UA PubSub been released."

End users put pressure on

The OPC Foundation is currently experiencing a wave of memberships - 100 new members joined last year alone. From Germany, for example, Miele is a representative of the household appliance manufacturers. After LG CNS, Samsung, the giant for consumer products in Korea, has now joined in order to optimize its own production. From the tobacco industry, Philip Morris International, British Tobacco, Imperial Tobacco and Japan Tobacco International are new members and have created and released a 'Tobacco Machine Communication' (TMC) as an OPC UA Companion specification in collaboration with their suppliers.

Security and technology trends

In cooperation with the M2M Alliance, the OPC Foundation has published the first practical security guide for the target group of users. "The exemplary security mechanisms built into OPC UA must also be used correctly in practice," says Chairman Uwe Pohlmann, Fraunhofer IEM, "this is precisely where we provide the necessary recommendations in a way that users can understand." Microsoft has provided the OPC Foundation with an OPC UA-capable Global Discovery Server (GDS) and client and has now published the source code as open source on GitHub. The GDS manages the OPC UA server configuration, centralizes discoveries and facilitates certificate management.

TSN and 5G

According to Hoppe, the OPC Foundation has clearly positioned itself for OPC UA over TSN and is showing an initial demo at the trade fair stand - "even though the configuration of a TSN network has not yet been completed by the IEEE." The aim is to achieve standardized horizontal machine-to-machine communication. The already secure exchange of information between machines via OPC UA will then offer new scenarios with the real-time-capable TSN layer. "The OPC UA TSN working group is very agile with over 85 companies. However, TSN is not the only option for the OPC Foundation - OPC UA over 5G will also solve incredibly exciting scenarios in the future. "We remain true to the agnosticism of the underlying transport channel and do not favor any option with the cloud protocols MQTT or AMQP either. The OPC Foundation's greatest value is its independence and the world's largest ecosystem for industrial interoperability," says Hoppe.