Mission accomplished - there is no other movement besides the OPC Foundation that is as successful in bringing the world together in terms of industrial interoperability," says Stefan Hoppe, who has been President of the OPC Foundation for a year. "We are growing worldwide and are particularly pleased to welcome Foxconn as the 699th member and another end user to the Foundation," continues Hoppe. Within a year, the OPC Foundation has grown by a further 104 members, including Okuma, Weidmüller, Makino Milling, Alstorm, Nikon, Persistant Systems, TÜV Süd, Baumüller and L'Orreal, to a total of 738 members. "We offer the world's largest eco-system for interoperability and a neutral ground for common standards in automation," says Hoppe.

Matthias Damm, CEO at Ascolab, emphasizes in the technological explanations that "the technological basis of OPC UA has been stable since 2007 and is constantly being expanded." For example, the Foundation's "Safety for OPC UA based on ProfiNET" initiative was launched in January 2018. With many enhancements, the results of these activities were released at the "OPC UA Safety - Part 15 of the OPC Standard" trade fair. "The current safety solution - based on client/server - is now being expanded under the wing of the Field Level Communications Group with PubSub."

The 'OPC UA Harmonization Working Group' has also got off to a successful start - "data types, features and interfaces such as energy management or recipe handling for machines from different markets are being harmonized here," says Damm.

TSN live demo in spring 2020

The FLC Initiative is also growing: Peter Lutz, Director of the Field Level Initiative, introduced Murrelektronik and Festo as two further members of the FLC Initiative's steering committee. This body now comprises 25 companies from the process and factory automation sector. "Over 240 experts from around 40 member companies of the OPC Foundation are now involved in developing the basic concepts for the controller-to-controller and controller-to-device use cases," says Lutz, adding: "Both conventional Ethernet based on UDP and direct layer 2 mapping using Ethernet TSN are supported." This approach ensures that the developed solution can be used in a wide variety of automation devices in process and factory automation. The steering committee has drawn up a roadmap, associated application scenarios and functional and non-functional requirements. The first version of the specification should be available as a release candidate by April 2020 and an initial demo with prototypes from various manufacturers will be shown at the Hannover Messe.

The Companion Standards

The VDMA is very active when it comes to different companion standards: "A total of 41 groups in the VDMA have been sensitized to defining the global language of production based on OPC UA," says Andreas Faath from the VDMA in his status report: "With published companion specifications for four markets such as robotics and machine vision, but also machine tools and plastics machines, a further 18 groups are actively involved in defining the description of data and interfaces for machines.

The closer cooperation between eCl@ss and the OPC Foundation has now also been sealed with a Memorandum of Understanding: "OPC UA technology allows the use of external dictionaries such as eCl@ss - we are pleased to have implemented the specific requirements of VDMA working groups here," says Hoppe.
The Foundation is also seeking closer contact with the process industry: "In 2020, we are aiming for closer and more direct contact with end-user associations such as Namur.

Kitchen 4.0 with OPC UA

"Due to the Industry 4.0 initiative, OPC UA is seen in many people's minds as a pure standard for factory automation," says Hoppe. But OPC UA also has friends in completely different industries: Holger Burgtorf from Küppersbusch presented the world's first deep fryer with an OPC UA connection at the press conference. The associated umbrella association HKI for industrial kitchen equipment opted for OPC UA in 2016 following a study on IoT solutions and published a total of 14 standardized device types at the end of 2018. "In 2019, Küppersbusch was a pioneer, equipping 50 different appliance types in over 200 different variants with an OPC UA communication interface," says Burgtorf proudly.

IT companies support OPC UA

Erich Barnstedt from Microsoft presented the activities of the Open Manufacturing Platform (OMP) founded by Microsoft and BMW: "The aim of the OMP is to support manufacturers and suppliers along the entire value chain in accelerating the development of industrial IoT applications. The focus is on providing an open data model and open source components that are integrated with OPC UA. This enables companies to bring their solutions to market faster while retaining control over their data and intellectual property." Barnstedt referred in particular to the deep Azure integration with OPC UA: "With Azure, we deliver the desired openness and integration with international standards such as OPC UA."

At the end of the event, Hoppe positioned the OPC Foundation as a "world library for the description of industrial things", which is openly available on the Internet - even for non-OPC members. "The time of closed eco-systems is coming to an end," Hoppe is convinced and announces an international workshop conference for asset management in Frankfurt at the end of January as a further step towards harmonization.