The OPC Foundation is now enjoying great popularity in the cloud world. »Who would have ever thought that Alibaba Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Huawei Cloud, Microsoft Azure, SAP Cloud and now Google Cloud would come together under the umbrella of the OPC Foundation,« says Stefan Hoppe and adds: »All these cloud providers have now come together to use the asset information modeled by our partners - such as the VDMA - with OPC UA in their cloud solutions!»

Until now, many providers in the IT and cloud world have perceived OPC UA as a pure transport protocol. And of course, according to Hoppe, »nobody transports data with OPC UA via TCP or UDP within cloud solutions. REST interfaces have been used for OPC UA since 2016 or MQTT since 2018.«

However, the IT world is now discovering the unique core of OPC UA as a modeling language: »We provide an extremely powerful description language to describe data, interfaces and the behavior of applications - and cloud providers and users appreciate this.«

Praveen Rao, from Google Cloud, explains why he has now joined the OPCF's Cloud Initiative: »Data interoperability between OT, IT and cloud environments is a key business driver for manufacturers. The Cloud Initiative ensures that our customers in the manufacturing industry have the tools and technologies they need to achieve seamless integration and realize the full potential of their data in the cloud.«

Premiere: an end-user counsel

For the first time in its history, the OPC Foundation has also established an End-User Counsel to validate and coordinate the goals and architecture of the Cloud Initiative directly with user requirements. Twenty-five companies attended the kick-off meeting, including Boehringer-Ingelheim, ContiTech, Danone, Equinor, L'Oreal Operations, Miele, Mondelez, Renault Group, Japan Tobacco International, Tetra Pak and Volkswagen. Thierry Daneau from Renault Group says: »We strongly believe in the importance of the OPC UA Cloud initiative as it represents the final step towards the standardization of OPC UA in the cloud. We are confident that the results of this working group will allow the model structuring logic to be maintained within the cloud layer, address the scalability challenge and thus achieve the vision of a fully structured and standardized data acquisition chain.«

The Digital Product Passport (DPP)

However, Hoppe is particularly proud of the proof of concept of a Digital Product Passport, which is being developed in cooperation with CESMII and the IDTA, as envisaged by the EU.

Background: The CESMII, the LNI 4.0, the Digital Twin Consortium, the ECLASS e.V., the Industrial Digital Twin Association (IDTA), the OPC Foundation (OPCF), the VDMA and the ZVEI have joined forces to create a best-of-breed system architecture for the upcoming Digital Product Passport (DPP) by combining the best aspects of the Asset Administration Shell, OPC UA and other related technologies. By leveraging CESMII's Smart Manufacturing Profiles modeled with OPC UA and integrating them with the semantics of the Asset Administration Shell and ECLASS, the existing ecosystem of OPC UA modeling tools can be used to create DPPs. The existing REST interfaces of OPC UA and the Asset Admin Shell can be used to access the resulting DPPs. Integration with the Eclipse Dataspace Components (EDC) is also possible, creating an international data space. »I am delighted that we have been able to reach consensus with so many of the leading Industry 4.0 consortia and institutes to create this common architecture,« said Erich Barnstedt from Microsoft. »With this approach, companies can leverage their existing investments in OPC UA technology to easily create digital product passports for their industry and make them available in their supply chain via standardized interfaces, data models, data formats and semantics. I am convinced that this will give DPP technology the necessary boost in adoption it needs to meet the 2027 deadline set by the European Commission.«

OPC Foundation at the SPS 2024: Hall 5, Booth 140