Mr. Kroiss, you have worked hard over the last three years to promote OPC UA TSN - was it time well spent?

Georg Kroiss: Definitely yes! Thanks to the new Field-Level Communication initiative under the umbrella of the OPC Foundation, everything is now on track organizationally: OPC UA TSN is coming to the field level. What I'm particularly pleased about is that, from a global perspective, all the influential companies are on board - whether from Asia, the USA or Europe. It's impressive to see that 90 participants from 38 companies came together in Munich at the start of this year for the kick-off of the new initiative's technical working groups. The whole range of topics will be addressed there - manufacturer-independent device profiles, interoperability, communication and configuration, functional safety and more. And all this with the prospect of creating a global, manufacturer-independent standard.

Isn't progress very slow in such a large group? In the days of the Shapers, the group was small and fast...

Georg Kroiss: Ultimately, we all want a global standard and an end to the fieldbus war - there's no way around the large group! In addition, the working groups of this initiative are in the process of adopting an appropriately agile organizational form so that the preliminary work of recent years - also from the Shapers group - can be taken into account accordingly and the new members can be efficiently brought on track. Nevertheless, it is certainly true that a group of around thirty leading companies from the automation sector with their different historical backgrounds, ecosystems and interests will need time to reach some compromises. However, the pressure to make progress quickly does not primarily come from the initiative itself, but mainly from the market: would you as a customer accept it if your automation supplier told you that you should continue to use their proprietary communication solution in the future because they are happy to take their time with the manufacturer-neutral global standard?

Coupling TSN with edge computer technology opens up completely new possibilities in automation.

© TTTech

So you mean that the race for the first production-ready OPC UA TSN solutions has already begun among automation specialists?

Georg Kroiss: In any case, several large automation companies announced at last year's SPS IPC Drives that they are already building prototype devices. Some of these devices are already practically ready for series production, others are still actual prototypes. The core of the communication solution, namely the connection of OPC UA PubSub with TSN, is largely fully specified. Even if you keep hearing that "TSN is not yet ready" - in fact, all the basic standards from the IEEE required for OPC UA TSN are already stable, and if you really want to play it safe here, you can start with FPGAs. What actually still lies ahead of us are conformance tests and certification to ensure interoperability. These topics must be a high priority for the Group in order to ensure the correct and comprehensive implementation of the standards. However, the outstanding issues are not stopping automation specialists from starting product development. Customers will quickly recognize who is offering real solutions and who is just free-riding on the OPC UA TSN bandwagon.

What is TTTech doing to stay ahead of the game with OPC UA TSN?

Georg Kroiss: In our experience, automation engineers not only need a TSN IP for FPGAs or ASICs in practice, but also everything that goes with it - embedded software, reference hardware, configuration tools. We offer precisely this complete package - exclusively with standard interfaces based on the IEEE-YANG models and, in the case of our reference implementation, with the common Linux APIs. In addition, we can already offer a prototype OPC UA over TSN implementation on a project basis. We plan to release this as a product in the course of this year; we will continuously optimize and expand our existing TSN solution including configuration tools.

It is important to remember that TSN is not a single standard, but a whole group of standards. Implementing these standards in an optimally coordinated and efficient manner is no trivial matter, as we know from many years of experience. Ethernet is also a living standard and is constantly evolving - in other words, new sub-standards are being added. We take care of all of this for our automation customers - allowing them to concentrate on their differentiating features and be faster on the market.

At SPS IPC Drives, you announced that TSN will also be deeply integrated into your own edge/fog computing platform.

Georg Kroiss: We have decided to expand our offering around our industrial IoT platform Nerve. The combination of the deterministic, converged OT/IT network with edge/fog computing opens up completely new possibilities: Any 'workloads' can run hardware-independently, just like in a data center - with TSN and the corresponding virtualization technology, this can also be implemented for control tasks in the future.

Does this still fit in with TTTech - also in terms of the required know-how?

Georg Kroiss: At TTTech, we have built up expertise in the field of real-time virtualization over many years. Not only in the industrial sector, but also in our automotive business, where we have MotionWise, the leading safety software platform for autonomous driving on the market as 'TTTech Auto'. The expertise from the various sectors flows together in our central development pool, which we also use for our automation solutions. When it comes to virtualization, we have found that there are different worlds, whether virtual machines - as is common in data centers - process 'normal' workloads without too many real-time requirements, or whether they are used to process demanding applications.
or whether you are virtualizing demanding control tasks.

What can TTTech already offer in this area today?

Georg Kroiss : At SPS IPC Drives 2018, together with our semiconductor partner Intel, we presented two solutions that make it possible to quickly implement Industry 4.0 use cases and realize proof-of-concepts for future functionalities: The Industrial Edge Insights Kit, which enables customers to quickly access, visualize and analyse machine data of any kind, and the Real-time Machine Data Kit, which allows data at the edge to be processed directly with any applications in the form of Docker containers or virtual machines.

And what's next for TTTech with regard to IIoT?

Georg Kroiss: We will continue to expand the solutions already presented in 2019 and implement new functionalities with key customers as proof-of-concepts. So it remains exciting - both with OPC UA TSN and in IIoT!