The Shaper solution, which is based on OPC UA and TSN (Time-Sensitive Networking), is designed to enable the simple and secure use of information across different manufacturer systems. In addition, the latency and robustness in converged industrial networks is to be improved by TSN (Time-Sensitive Networking).

"Connecting multi-vendor systems end-to-end requires a harmonized, interoperable solution that provides both consistent information models and consistent communication and application behavior," says Paul Brooks, Business Development Manager at Rockwell Automation. "To achieve this goal, experts from the various automation companies are working together on a solution. This provides manufacturing and industrial companies with harmonized application profiles for I/O, motion and safety devices," said Sebastian Sachse from B&R ndustrial Automation.

The new OPC UA TSN solution is intended to ensure the interoperability of different manufacturer solutions in the same network. Several companies (ABB, Belden, Bosch Rexroth, B&R, Cisco Systems, Hilscher, Kuka, National Instruments, Phoenix Contact, Pilz, Schneider Electric, TTTech and Wago Kontakttechnik) are working together with industry consortia such as Avnu, IEEE, IIC, LNI 4.0 and the OPC Foundation. The aim of the companies is to announce the exact procedure for harmonizing the application profiles by the middle of the year. This should then take the final hurdle to complete interoperability. Part of the goal is the certification of the overall solution from a single source - right down to the application profile level.

The aforementioned companies have already published white papers on OPC UA TSN technology, such as an IIC white paper on "Converged Traffic Types". They also made an important contribution to the recently published PubSub extension of OPC UA and are planning a collaboration between the IIC and LNI testbeds.