Stefan Hoppe

OPC UA in Practice – About Connecting Old and New Systems and the Context of Data

In this episode, the Executive Director of the OPC Foundation – Stefan Hoppe – reports on how OPC UA is used in practice in the context of IoT. A rare insight in an otherwise technical subject. Because: OPC UA is not a protocol, but a semantic digitalization standard! “The future of automotive production lies in the control, optimization and profitability of cross-site manufacturing based on secure, real-time data” – Renault Group recognized this several years ago and actively pushed the integration of OPC UA-enabled components and systems. In this podcast episode, you will learn how these companies apply and implement OPC UA with which use cases on the basis of 6 further projects from Miele, Equinor and Rosendahl, among others. Not just an issue for manufacturing companies! “Connecting old and new plants today really costs work” The tasks for many companies is the connection of old and new plants as well as machines and components. That costs a lot of time and work today. Keyword: Brownfield. Some of the machines are from 1970 – the other machines just acquired last year in the factory. Many of the older machines are still equipped with old Siemens S5 controllers or other controllers from Beckhoff, FANUC, Heidenhain, Allen-Bradley (Rockwell Automation) or WAGO controllers. Today, for many manufacturing companies, there is often still no uniform access to data from different control types! That’s why companies are working to make the data available across the board. Because: In the best case, the controls or other data sources should only be handled once and then made available throughout. In practice, this means that not every machine should have 30 applications and interfaces. “It’s not like every car has its own new fuel nozzle.” Standard tools and standardized connectivity are needed here, because this is the only way to scale digitalization. Today, interfaces and information are often not available identically across manufacturers! Today, the information models behind them are also often not designed across industries so that a provider can seamlessly use the same interface and information model. The answer to that? In the podcast! “Data without any context is pretty useless” In simple terms, OPC UA is the modernization of information exchange according to the latest state of knowledge. Data is useless without context. Sensors provide values such as vibration, temperature and associated time stamps. However, humans and software cannot know whether the data is attributable to a pump, motor or valve. Most importantly, whether the data point refers to hydrocarbons at the inlet or outlet. A data exchange where a human “translation” must be interposed. This results in a correspondingly high time expenditure for adaptations or the integration of devices and systems. The answer to that? In the podcast! But how can data be made available consistently? How does standardized connectivity work? What role does OPC UA play for the IIoT? For which use cases is this relevant?