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OPC Foundation participated as a Platinum Sponsor at the first ARC Industry Leadership Forum Singapore on August 1, 2024. The theme of the Forum was Accelerate Transformation in the Age of AI, Open Automation, and Sustainability. With over 200 attendees the Forum provided the right platform to network and share experiences and best practices. Stefan Hoppe, President and Executive Director, OPC Foundation, presented remotely from Tokyo about the OPC Foundation's achievements and future initiatives, particularly focusing on the integration of OPC UA with cloud technologies.
The OPC Foundation has surpassed 1,000 members, with Hexagon being the latest addition. The organization focuses on secure, reliable information sharing from sensors to the cloud. Stefan stressed the importance of standardization in ensuring that different systems can communicate effectively, regardless of the platform or device. This emphasis on interoperability and flexibility is critical as industries continue to adopt more complex automation and AI systems. “And everything what we do is open,” emphasized Stefan. This blog highlights the key points of his presentation, which can be viewed here.
Tracing the Journey
The OPC journey began in 1990; and since the first published product in 2007 there has never been a backward compatibility break. It is critical for industry to trust the standard. So, any OPC client can still connect to the 2007 OPC server, which is in a wind turbine in the North Sea. OPC UA is not a protocol but a modeling language that standardizes information structure and description, allowing secure and reliable data transfer across different layers and systems. Protocols are built in, and the standardized information can be moved horizontally between devices through all layers and remain consistent in all situations. Currently, there are over 150 of these standardized domain standards. The OPC Field Initiative, started in 2018, aims to enable horizontal controller-to-controller communication and integrate Ethernet APL for deeper field device connectivity.
Stefan spoke about how the OPC Foundation brings together the Operational Technology (OT) and Information Technology (IT) sectors, aiming to solve the digitalization challenge by fostering collaboration between these traditionally separate domains. The OPC Foundation has a dedicated AI initiative that aims to integrate artificial intelligence into industrial processes. The AI initiative has attracted interest from over 60 large companies and focuses on standardizing information and ensuring interoperability between the OT and IT systems.
OPC UA Cloud Initiative
The OPC UA cloud initiative is a significant effort by the OPC Foundation to enhance industrial communications by integrating OPC UA with cloud services. This initiative aims to standardize information models across different cloud services, with major cloud providers, such as Alibaba, AWS, Huawei, Microsoft, and SAP agreeing to maintain data context within their systems.
The initiative includes several key components:
OPC UA over MQTT: This provides secure transport from edge to cloud and cloud to cloud. Companies such as Siemens, Beckhoff, Phoenix-Contact, Wago, and others have already integrated this standardized transport called “OPC UA over MQTT” – an OPC UA standard (Part 14) since 2018.
OPC UA REST Interface: This allows cloud-based OPC UA server access.
OPC UA WoT (Web of Things) Connectivity: This standardizes industrial connectivity software configuration.
Validation and Certification Program: This ensures interoperability and allows end users to switch cloud suppliers with minimal effort.
OPC UA's ability to standardize information and provide secure transport via different protocols makes it an ideal solution for integrating various components of green energy systems and digital twins. This is essential for optimizing energy management systems and creating digital twins of industrial plants. For example, a large, combined cycle desalinization plant used OPC UA to develop a digital twin, which helped optimize the usage of their current assets and achieve significant savings in gas consumption and CO2 emissions.
The OPC Foundation has also established a new steering committee to harmonize existing cloud-related working groups and create a pre-competitive environment for collaboration. This initiative aims to replicate the best practices established in the OPC Foundation Field Level Communications Initiative by bringing cloud architects together with technology experts from the OPC Foundation.
Panel Discussion
At the end of the session on Technologies for Transformation, Stefan put forth some interesting perspectives during the panel discussion.
On Ethernet-APL integration: Ideally, it should be easy and the different transport mechanisms and protocols should just work together. But what is different now is that all the big players and associations are collaborating effectively in multiple areas. A group worked together to improve the configuration aspects of security and align that to other systems. Thus, the ownership of PA-DIM (Process Automation Device Information Model) was extended.
OPC Foundation AI: AI will significantly cut down engineering efforts. For example, creating an OPC companion spec for wind turbines is now mostly handled by AI, which can do 80 percent of the work accurately. However, experts are still needed to refine it. Major automation companies like Siemens and Beckhoff have already integrated AI into their tools, enabling automatic code generation and implementation. In the future, assets will communicate in human language, translating instructions into actions without needing CPU languages. AI facilitates this interaction among various systems, and OPC supports these advancements with information models.
On Sustainability: A law must be introduced to heavily tax unused digital twins, emphasizing the importance of utilizing digital twins as per European regulations. The digital product passport, which includes multiple single product passports like the carbon footprint passport, is becoming a European regulation. This passport will list the total carbon footprint of a product. Future taxes will be based on CO2 footprints to encourage reduction and ensure efficient systems. In today's world, money is crucial, and everything ultimately revolves around it. There is an urgent need to accelerate focus on renewables and the planet.