OPC Foundation extends standard for enterprise integration
By Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 8/1/2006 6:00:00 AM
The OPC Foundation used Dedham, Mass.-based ARC Advisory Group's June Forum to announce its new Unified Architecture (UA) for data and information sharing between the plant floor and the enterprise.
OPC UA unifies all OPC specifications, leveraging service-oriented architecture (SOA)-based Web services technology as the communication mechanism with enterprise systems. Tom Burke, president and executive director, was joined by several vendors that were making announcements of their own for OPC UA-ready systems and solutions.
"It's not about data anymore, but about information—and taking that from the shop floor to the top floor," says Burke. "We looked at all the protocols in our domain; the number is huge. We have thousands of apps and devices out there, so how do we make it all work together? The concept is about supporting all that and making OPC real. OPC UA is very new."
But OPC itself is not. OPC—which stands for OLE for Process Control—was first based on Microsoft's OLE common object model/distributed common object model (COM/DCOM) technologies. The OPC Foundation is all about interoperability in automation, seeking to create and maintain open specifications that standardize communication of acquired process data, alarm and event records, historical data, and batch data to multi-vendor enterprise systems, and between production devices.
As such, UA is an evolutionary step forward based on Microsoft .NET technology, exploiting the power of XML as the communications mechanism for invoking services between the automation and enterprise layers. OPC UA enables complete data access and exchange services for configuration, diagnostic, and run-time operational data.
"ARC is a strong advocate for anything based on open standards to make interoperability easier, and establish connectivity between the plant floor and the enterprise—but do it in a scalable way," says Greg Resnick, an ARC research director. "OPC UA provides for what is new in the plant, but also for what the whole legacy entails."
