Over 320 experts from more than 65 companies were involved in the development of the specifications, which are referred to as OPC UA FX (Field eXchange).

"We have thus reached an important milestone in extending the scope of OPC UA to the field level and realizing the vision of the OPC Foundation. Namely, to establish OPC UA as a standardized and manufacturer-independent industrial interoperability solution in factory and process automation that scales completely from the field to the cloud," says Peter Lutz, Director Field Level Communications at the OPC Foundation.

These advances in the initiative were to be presented to the public for the first time at SPS in Nuremberg. Peter Lutz: "We have a multi-vendor demo in which controllers and network components from 20 manufacturers - including the world's largest automation manufacturers - are combined to exchange process data configured using OPC UA FX via OPC UA."

The focus of the interoperability demo is on horizontal communication between controllers, i.e. controller-to-controller communication. With the UAFX extensions, the controllers are able to exchange process data with other controllers using UAFX Connections and PubSub mechanisms. In the demo itself, process data is exchanged via UDP/IP using wired Ethernet or Ethernet TSN and in combination with a 5G radio link.

On show for the first time: The trade fair demo, which uses the example of a bottling line to implement the use of OPC UA right down to field level. Controllers from different manufacturers take on different subtasks - cleaning, filling, capping and labeling bottles - and exchange process and real-time data with each other.

© OPC Foundation

In the demo, the controllers act as UAFX Publishers and/or UAFX Subscribers, which exchange data via UAFX Connections. The controllers are interconnected via so-called UAFX Connection Managers, which are either integrated into the controller or implemented as external software components. The Connection Managers used were implemented by Siemens and Unified Automation.

All controllers can be monitored in real time via a central dashboard and the respective statuses, selected process data and other information from the UAFX asset information model can be visualized.

The manufacturers involved in the controller-to-controller trade fair demo are ABB, Beckhoff, Bosch Rexroth, B&R, Emerson, Festo, Honeywell, Hirschmann/Belden, Huawei, Kuka, Mitsubishi, Moxa, Omron, Phoenix Contact, Rockwell Automation, Schneider Electric, Siemens, Unified Automation, Wago and Yokogawa.

Separate OPC UA over TSN demo

Deterministic OPC UA communication via standard Ethernet: This is the goal of a separate 'OPC UA over TSN' demo, which is dedicated to the workflow in the interaction of UAFX controllers with TSN switches from various manufacturers. This demo uses direct Layer 2 mapping, which results in high protocol efficiency for demanding automation applications. "On the one hand, we are showing the 'network-only' TSN specified in RC2, in which the controllers work with VLAN tagging and communicate via a deterministic network infrastructure," says Lutz and adds: "At the same time, we are giving an outlook on 'plug-and-produce' TSN, which enables intelligent and flexible networking via a convergent network - based on the future IEC/IEEE 60802 standard."

The safety specification is available

The Director also reports progress in terms of safety: "We have now completed a revised OPC UA Safety specification, which now supports PubSub and therefore also UAFX in addition to Client/Server. For the first time, we now have a prototype of an OPC UA Safety test tool that can be used for development-related tests and the certification of OPC UA Safety devices."