Launch of “OPC UA Cloud Library”

The OPC Foun­da­tion, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with CESMII, announced the launch of the “OPC UA Cloud Library” Joint Work­ing Group (JWG). The goal of the JWG is to spec­i­fy how OPC UA infor­ma­tion mod­els of machines, SCADA and Man­u­fac­tur­ing Exe­cu­tion Sys­tems will be stored in and accessed from a cloud-based data­base. Such a data­base will enable man­u­fac­tur­ers to draw from a wide range of OPC UA infor­ma­tion mod­els and pro­files for use in their pre-built shopfloor and busi­ness dig­i­tal­iza­tion applications.
The col­lab­o­ra­tion between the OPC Foun­da­tion and the Smart Man­u­fac­tur­ing Insti­tute is a nat­ur­al fit giv­en their com­ple­men­tary efforts. On one hand, the US gov­ern­ment-backed Smart Man­u­fac­tur­ing Insti­tute sets out to help accel­er­ate the adop­tion of Smart Man­u­fac­tur­ing by busi­ness­es of all sizes by enabling fric­tion­less move­ment of infor­ma­tion (data and con­text) between real-time oper­a­tions and the peo­ple and sys­tems that cre­ate val­ue in their orga­ni­za­tions. On the oth­er hand, the OPC Foun­da­tion cre­at­ed a glob­al­ly adopt­ed open data inter­op­er­abil­i­ty stan­dard via its OPC UA spec­i­fi­ca­tion. The specification’s infor­ma­tion mod­el­ing capa­bil­i­ties and secure, scal­able com­mu­ni­ca­tions made it a cor­ner­stone of Indus­trie 4.0 and vir­tu­al­ly every oth­er nation­al Indus­tri­al IoT ini­tia­tive. By work­ing togeth­er, CESMII and the OPC Foun­da­tion aim to enable the broad­est range of US man­u­fac­tur­ers and beyond to inno­vate and go-to-mar­ket in their dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion using the right data mod­el­ing foundation.
John Dyck, CEO, CESMII, explained, “This joint work­ing group val­i­dates our core, over­ar­ch­ing strat­e­gy and com­mit­ment to inter­op­er­abil­i­ty and an open ecosys­tem, enabling the dig­i­ti­za­tion and reuse of stan­dard, tem­pla­tized data struc­tures that will dra­mat­i­cal­ly reduce the cost and com­plex­i­ties of imple­ment­ing Smart Man­u­fac­tur­ing.” Mr. Dyck con­tin­ued, “Crowd­sourc­ing the domain exper­tise required to cre­ate these reusable device, machine and process pro­files will dra­mat­i­cal­ly low­er the bar­ri­er of entry for inno­va­tion and val­ue cre­ation in man­u­fac­tur­ing, and ensure that Smart Man­u­fac­tur­ing is acces­si­ble not just to the large man­u­fac­tur­ers, but to the small and medi­um man­u­fac­tur­ers as well!”
“The OPC UA Cloud Library Joint Work­ing Group between the OPC Foun­da­tion and the Smart Man­u­fac­tur­ing Insti­tute fills a gap in the OPC UA promise of “from sen­sor to cloud”. Only when all OPC UA data mod­els are pub­licly avail­able on the Inter­net with­out the need to extract them from phys­i­cal machines or on-prem sys­tems, can this promise be com­plete­ly ful­filled. OPC UA will then not only be the de-fac­to inter­na­tion­al stan­dard for inter­op­er­a­ble machine intel­li­gence, shop floor MES and SCADA sys­tems but also for dash­boards, dig­i­tal twins and cloud ana­lyt­ics solu­tions, too.” said Erich Barn­st­edt, Head of Azure Indus­tri­al IoT, Microsoft and the chair­per­son of the JWG.
Ste­fan Hoppe, Pres­i­dent and Exec­u­tive Direc­tor, OPC Foun­da­tion com­ment­ed “It is excit­ing to see the scale at which CESMII is poised to help dri­ve dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion among US-based man­u­fac­tur­ers using an open stan­dard like OPC UA ”, Mr. Hoppe con­tin­ued, “the Smart Man­u­fac­tur­ing Institute’s deci­sion to stan­dard­ize on OPC UA for key parts of its ini­tia­tive will enable US man­u­fac­tur­ers more quick­ly and eas­i­ly inte­grate their own machines at home and abroad, where OPC UA is the de fac­to stan­dard for Indus­tri­al IoT data interoperability.“