The OPC Foundation announces the addition of the publish/subscribe messaging pattern to the OPC UA specifications. The first live demonstration featuring multiple vendors will be shown at the world's largest Industrial Automation show Hanover Fair the week of April 25 in the OPC Foundation Booth hall 9 - A11.
The OPC Foundation addition of publish/subscribe communication functionality to OPC UA provides the necessary infrastructure to achieve seamless interoperability for IIoT, IoT, and industrie 4.0 applications and devices. OPC has been based on a client/server architecture, and is now enhancing the architecture with the inclusion of publish/subscribe to provide a solid infrastructure that allows information integration from embedded devices to the cloud.
The OPC Foundation is working currently with 42 international (and many more to be added) suppliers that are developing products and solutions for the IIoT and needed to provide publish/subscribe to the technology portfolio to facilitate high-performance high reliable device application connectivity for this important market. Support for publish/subscribe as well as the client/server architecture provides a complete solution for any device or application. Existing applications already using OPC UA client/server communications can add the publish/subscribe features with minimal effort.
A demonstration of the OPC UA publish/subscribe functionality will be held at Hanover Fair the week of April 25 in the OPC Foundation Booth hall 9 - A11. This demonstration will consist of multiple vendors showing OPC UA enhanced with publish/subscribe, truly demonstrating how easy it is to have connectivity and information integration in IoT devices and applications. The demonstration will show both semantic and syntactic data interoperability.
"State-of-the-art cloud infrastructures from Microsoft, Google and others use publish/subscribe protocols for native connectivity to the edge without the use of adapters” says Jim Luth, Schneider Electric and OPC Foundation CTO. “Now OPC UA applications can be friction-free first-class data providers to the cloud."
“OPC UA’s new publish/subscribe capability provides a uniform model for distributing data and events from OPC UA device to interested observers inside the production environment as well as in external IT and analytics cloud systems. The cloud integration path uses the ISO/IEC AMQP 1.0 protocol with JSON data encoding, which readily allows handling of the information in modern stream and batch analytics systems. Future devices that will implement the new OPC UA publish/subscribe capability will allow for direct and friction-free integration with modern cloud platforms, enabling using modern analytics capabilities for system optimization and predictive maintenance”, says Clemens Vasters, Principal Program Manager, Microsoft Azure and OPC Technical Advisory Council Member.
“OPC UA has been clearly designed to allow plug-and-play interoperability and the ability to add new communication architectures and communication technologies allowing applications and devices to take advantage of new technologies that the OPC Foundation delivers with limited or no modifications required to their existing products. This is timeless durability at its finest “, says Thomas J. Burke, OPC Foundation President & Executive Director.
“The OPC Foundation commitment to be the solution for the Internet of everything, inclusive of Industrie 4.0, IIoT, IoT, and M2M, necessitated that the OPC UA architecture be enhanced with the publish/subscribe communication architecture. The industry has recognized the value of connected devices beyond just industrial automation and the OPC Foundation commitment is to provide the best technology to achieve connectivity and information integration for all markets”, says Stefan Hoppe, Global OPC Foundation Vice President.
List of companies actively in the OPC UA Pub/Sub Working Group:
HMS Networks, Siemens, National Instruments, mFactor Engineering, Beckhoff, Softing, Mitsubishi Electric Europe B.V., ICONICS, TIBCO, COPA-DATA, 4CE Industry, Ascolab, B&R, Robert Bosch GmbH, Real Time Automation, SEW Eurodrive, Fraunhofer-Anwendungszentrum Industrial Automation (IOSB-INA), Honeywell, Exor International, Grid Cloud Systems, ABB, TTTech Computertechnik AG, SICK AG,
Inductive Automation, C-Labs, IBHsoftec GmbH, GE Global Research, Technische Universität Wien, Institut für Rechnergestützte Automation, ISW Stuttgart, Bosch Rexroth, Schneider Electric, VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd, KEBA AG, KUKA Roboter, Mitsubishi, Yokogawa, Beeond, Inc., CAS, Omron, Microsoft, WAGO, Institute Industrial (inIT)
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