Experts argue that OPC UA should be introduced for autonomous next-generation industrial automation systems through stable IT-OT integration and standard specifications.

At the '2022 IIoT Innovation DAY' seminar held by e4ds in April, B&R Vice President Sa Jae-hoon addressed the importance of communication through the use of standards in industrial automation solutions in his presentation on the topic of 'IIoT OPC UA (OPC Unified Architecture) 4.0 Integration Technology.'

OPC UA is a technology from the OPC Foundation for reliable connections between devices in factories using industrial protocols.

The OPC Foundation is expanding its business model with 840 member companies, including automation solution providers such as B&R, IT companies, and deep learning and machine learning platform companies.

B&R is a software-level development tool for experimentation and verification and control applications.He said that they are maintaining a symbiotic relationship in which they distribute and sell applications to customers themselves.

Vice President Sa Jae-hoon said that the number of OPC UA suppliers continues to increase, and that communication technologies OPC UA and UAPX have also been created in connection with new businesses related to the convergence of IT and OT for several years.

A new C2C specification called UAFX includes two segments of demos, which are being implemented for C2C controller and sensor device communication.

“Companies that are ahead of the standard have no choice but to lead the market by forming supply and consortiums,” said Vice President Sa. “Our country has a good mix of supply and demand companies, but we lack manufacturing technology,” he said, adding that the machinery manufacturing industry is lacking in risk management and must prepare for defense in advance.

In the second half of the lecture, it was said that OPC UA can be presented as a model to address the shortcomings in practical data acquisition costs and real-time acquisition of high-quality data when introducing machine learning and deep learning to the manufacturing industry.

He also said that in the future, communication devices will be able to exchange data without conflict in a new way than before.

The second half of the lecture introduced map views. Map View is a feature that enables web functionality on PLC touch, and is a type of edge computing that achieves efficiency by putting widgets on PLC and displaying them as if they were on PLC.

Director Sa Jae-hoon said, “Currently, there are not many places where OPC UA introduction is essential, but in order to integrate it in future smart industrial sites, we need to prepare for the standard in advance and become familiar with using equipment that uses the standard in advance.”