The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) will reshape the industrial landscape across a wide range of industries. While this diversity opens up great opportunities, it also brings with it significant industry-wide interoperability challenges. To address this challenge, the Object Management Group (OMG) and the OPC Foundation have developed a collaborative strategy for markets and technical interoperability. The strategy combines the two leading IIoT connectivity standards: OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA) and Data Distribution Service (DDS). The strategy is underpinned by statements from the OMG and OPC Foundation, the Industry 4.0 platform and the Industrial Internet Consortium, the leading DDS vendors (RTI, Prismtech and Twin Oaks), leading OPC UA vendors (Unified Automation, Ascolabs and Matrikon) and companies such as GE, Siemens, Honeywell, National Instruments and SAP.

Thomas J. Burke is President and Executive Director of the OPC Foundation. He founded the OPC Foundation in 1995.

© OPC Foundation

Interoperability and connectivity are crucial for the rise of the industrial IoT. With their joint approach, the two organizations are now removing all obstacles to the adaptation of the IIoT. The IIoT is creating a new world of information integration and connectivity. Both the OPC Foundation (with OPC UA) and the OMG (with DDS) provide important standards to ensure this connectivity. Both are committed to information integration and interoperability. This collaboration provides the complete infrastructure and solution that enables manufacturers and end users to achieve the necessary full connectivity and integration of information.

The joint strategy describes the DDS and OPC UA standards as largely complementary and compatible and both technologies as critical to the future of IIoT. With this statement, both industry organizations want to eliminate confusion and uncertainty among end users in the market, which will lead to a broader and faster market introduction of both standards. The announcement clarifies where and how the technologies can be used for the various application scenarios. It highlights technical initiatives for the development of future interoperable interfaces and also provides guidelines for applications that need to choose a path into the 'interconnected future' today.

The standards

OPC UA is an industrial communication architecture for platform-independent, high-performance, secure, reliable and semantic interoperability between sensors, field devices, controllers and applications at store floor level in real time as well as between the store floor and the corporate IT cloud. OPC UA is currently widespread in automation and is used in manufacturing, process control and energy technology applications.

DDS provides secure, platform-independent, real-time data sharing over any type of network. DDS enables applications to define and share application data with a controlled 'Quality of Service' (QoS) such as performance, scalability, reliability, longevity and security. Key applications of the standard are common in medical, transportation, energy and defense technology.

Dr. Stan Schneider is CEO of RealTime Innovations (RTI), an industrial IoT connectivity provider. He is a member of the IIC Steering Committee and the advisory boards of the Smart Industry and IoT Solutions World Congress.

© OMG

Today, there is little overlap between DDS and OPC UA in the applications. Even if they are used in the same market (for example in the energy sector), the use cases are quite different. OPC UA provides client-server interaction between components such as devices or applications. DDS is a data-centric 'bus' for integration and peer-to-peer data distribution. With increasing adoption, it is expected that both technologies will be found more frequently in common markets and common systems. However, since the focused applications and approaches for DDS and OPC UA are different, most applications will be much better implemented with one or the other standard.

In general, both technologies should retain their focus. The consequence is not the exclusion of the technology approaches; rather, this focus is a practical decision to ensure that the technologies optimally cover the respective primary use cases. The organizations cooperate to cover all industrial applications and use cases while enabling the advancement of the current technology.