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The newest release of IOTech’s Edge Central platform provides commercial support for the latest version of the EdgeX Foundry open-source software framework, Edge Central 3.1, which now includes OPC UA Server technology. Edge Central, built on the open-source EdgeX Foundry framework, is a platform-independent microservices architecture with each service deployed as a container on the OS. Edge Central offers a variety of commercial value-add features, including device connectivity, data acquisition, edge rules & control, cloud streaming, and edge management.
OPC UA (Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture), a client/server technology that enables communications between a range of different devices and systems, is widely used in industrial automation systems. An OPC UA Server acts like a central hub of OPC UA namespaces that represent OPU UA nodes like a physical device, machine, or sensor on the factory floor. An OPC UA Client is used to remotely access and monitor that data via the protocol standard.
The new Edge Central OPC UA Server capability enables all collected southbound OT data to be updated into a single OPC UA Server namespace. While Edge Central App Services deliver data northbound to Cloud systems like AWS and Azure, etc., the OPC UA Server provides data access for a range of OPC UA Clients such as industrial SCADA systems, HMIs, MES and ERP systems. Edge Central already provides an OPC UA Client in the form of a southbound Device Service that can read and write data from an existing OPC UA Server.
Other notable additions in the new release include a Modbus discovery feature, which enables systems to be scanned for Modbus devices and automatically onboarded onto the platform, and a new web-based OPC UA browser tool also allows users to connect to an OPC UA Server for data visualization.
Further information on the market for industrial IoT edge software platforms can be found here.