"Covid19 will not stop us" is the first message from Stefan Hoppe, who has been President of the OPC Foundation for two years. He adds: "We are growing worldwide and expect to exceed the 800 member mark by the end of the year." Within a year, the OPC Foundation has grown by a further 60 members - including the heavyweights Cytiva, DTS Corporation, EMD Millipore Corporation, Emerson Process Management, Google Cloud, Jumo, NTT Communications Corporation, Shenzhen Inovance Technology Co. and Syntegon Technology - to currently 793 members, thus offering the world's largest eco-system for interoperability and neutral ground for common standards in automation.

The cloud activities

Hoppe highlights one new member in particular: "Who would have thought a few years ago that we would be welcoming GoogleCloudas a member at an OPC press conference - and together with Microsoft!" Dominik Wee from GoogleCloud then explains the reasons for joining the OPC Foundation and argues: "AI is driving the next stage of development in manufacturing - standardized machine-readable information models based on OPC UA accelerate this development. OPC UA will be our key to transferring machine data into our data analytics and artificial intelligence solutions to ultimately gain new uses and better productivity within the manufacturing process." The aim of GoogleCloud is to provide flexible decision-making capability at an industrial level by using artificial intelligence throughout the value chain, Wee said.

Erich Barnstedt, Microsoft, together with John Dyck, CEO of CESMII, will present the concrete OPC UA work in the cloud, and Barnstedt will report in particular on the progress of the "UA for Cloud Library" project: "OPC UA aims to improve the interoperability of machines and software from the field level to the cloud using open communication standards and information models. While OPC UA is now the standard in manufacturers' OT networks, there is still a lot to do in the cloud, especially when it comes to saving and reading information models. The "UA for Cloud Library" project is now filling precisely this gap: it allows the information models of machines to be integrated into cloud services even before the machine has been fully installed. "The programming of the software services is thus decoupled from the programming of the machines."

The Field Level Communications Initiative

The Field Level Communications Initiative is also still growing: since the initiative was launched in November 2018, more than 300 experts from over 60 OPC Foundation member companies have participated in the various technical working groups to jointly develop the technical concepts and specification content for the extension of the OPC UA framework to the field level. The group aims to define a harmonized solution for the process industry and factory automation. In addition to joining the Ethernet APL initiative, the stakeholders are particularly pleased to welcome Emerson, another market giant, to the FLC initiative.

Despite the restrictions imposed by COVID-19, an important milestone has now been reached with the completion of the first release candidate. The initial release candidate of the initiative consists of four specification parts (OPC UA Parts 80-83) and focuses on controller-to-controller communication for the exchange of process data and configuration data using OPC UA Client/Server and PubSub extensions in combination with peer-to-peer connections and basic diagnostics.

With the specifications now available, prototypes can be implemented and test specifications or test cases can be created for the OPC UA certification tool. In addition, this specification forms the basis for corresponding specification extensions to cover the controller-to-device and device-to-device use cases in the next step.

A 40-page technical paper has just been presented at the press conference, which explains the approach and basic concepts for extending OPC UA to field level for the various requirements and use cases in factory and process automation.

OPC UA for Machinery

To define a global language for production based on OPC UA, a total of around 600 companies in over 35 VDMA groups are also actively working on the standardization of OPC UA interfaces for machines and components in mechanical and plant engineering. "OPC UA for Machinery" defines the most important basic vocabulary of this global language and is the basis for cross-domain interoperability. "OPC UA for Machinery will serve as the foundation for all OPC UA interfaces of the VDMA in the future," says Andreas Faath, Head of Industrial Interoperability at the VDMA. Faath refers to the previous publications of "OPC UA for Machinery" and four new OPC UA working groups for compressed air technology, M2X intralogistics, air pollution control and textile test equipment.

Joint Working Groups

In addition to a new working group for semantic interoperability in the field of laboratory analysis devices in cooperation with Spectaris and the VDMA , Hoppe concludes by reporting on the increased adaptation of the joint results with PLCopen: The "UA Client for IEC61131-3 modules" have now been implemented by well-known PLC providers and have made it easier for Honeywell in the oil & gas industry, for example, to implement the IEC6-1131-3-based MDIS standard.