• Who the OPC Foundation are, and what they do
• Why OPC UA is more than ‘just another protocol’, and how it enables OT-IT convergence
• How to integrate legacy devices into an OPC UA framework

One of the big challenges in the Industrial IoT and Industry 4.0 is the variety of protocols, devices and application areas legacy systems: How can users guarantee the interoperability of everything?

OPC UA is the interoperability standard for the secure and reliable exchange of data in the industrial automation space and in other industries. It is platform independent and ensures the seamless flow of information among devices of different types from multiple vendors. The OPC Foundation is responsible for the development and maintenance of this standard. With the introduction of service-oriented architectures in manufacturing systems came new challenges in security and data modeling. The OPC Foundation developed the OPC UA specifications to address these needs and at the same time provided a feature-rich technology open-platform architecture that was future-proof, scalable and extensible. Today the acronym OPC stands for Open Platform Communications. In this Innotalks we will be looking at the benefits of the OPC UA Framework as an accelerator for the Industry 4.0.

The OPC Foundation provides specs, sample code and certification which securely move information end-to-end from the field to cloud and back. Crucially, they also provide a mechanism to define the transmitted information and its source device in a standardized, machine readable way, making the unification of the received information a process of simple data parsing. Together this facilitates the IT/OT convergence for IoT applications.