PubSub release as extension

The OPC Foun­da­tion announces the land­mark release of the long-antic­i­pat­ed Part 14 of the OPC UA Stan­dard known as Pub­lish-Sub­scribe or “Pub­Sub” for short.  Release of the OPC UA Pub­Sub spec­i­fi­ca­tion is sig­nif­i­cant because it broad­ly extends the use-cas­es where adop­tion of OPC UA is fea­si­ble and preferable.
Pub­Sub ful­ly inte­grates into the exist­ing OPC UA tech­nol­o­gy but enables fur­ther adop­tion of OPC UA at the deep­est lev­els of the shop-floor where con­trollers, sen­sors, and embed­ded devices typ­i­cal­ly require opti­mized, low pow­er and low-laten­cy com­mu­ni­ca­tions on local net­works. First imple­men­ta­tions could be real­ized in 8bit con­trollers using just 2kB SRAM. On the oth­er hand, Pub­Sub also enables the use of OPC UA in high­ly scal­able cloud-based appli­ca­tions where a vir­tu­al­ly unlim­it­ed num­ber of edge data sources such as sen­sors can sup­ply data secure­ly to inter­net-based bro­ker appli­ca­tions over pub­lic Wide Area Net­works (WANs).
The OPC UA open stan­dard has emerged as the de fac­to plat­form for imple­ment­ing secure end-to-end data exchange between third par­ty sys­tems and for facil­i­tat­ing inter­op­er­abil­i­ty between third-par­ty devices and appli­ca­tions. With its rich data mod­el­ing capa­bil­i­ties OPC UA Client/Server pro­vides the largest eco sys­tem for indus­tri­al inter­op­er­abil­i­ty. The new Pub­Sub exten­sion (Part 14) takes it to the next lev­el reach­ing out to an even broad­er scope of applications.
More specif­i­cal­ly, Pub­Sub enables the use of OPC UA direct­ly over the Inter­net (Wide Area Net­works) by uti­liz­ing pop­u­lar data trans­ports like MQTT and AMQP while retain­ing its key OPC UA end-to-end secu­ri­ty and stan­dard­ized data mod­el­ing advan­tages. Sim­i­lar­ly, Pub­Sub also enables use of the User Data Pro­to­col (UDP) for estab­lish­ing low-laten­cy, loss tol­er­at­ing con­nec­tions on LANs.
The release of OPC UA Pub­Sub is an impor­tant basic mile­stone to be tun­neled through real time chan­nel Time Sen­si­tive Net­work­ing (TSN) which will open fur­ther scenarios.
Thomas Burke, OPC Foun­da­tion Pres­i­dent explained “By extend­ing the reach of where OPC UA can be used both in-and-beyond the enter­prise, the Pub-Sub spec­i­fi­ca­tion helps  firm­ly posi­tion OPC UA as a fun­da­men­tal stan­dard for enabling the imple­men­ta­tion of uni­ver­sal data inter­con­nec­tiv­i­ty and infor­ma­tion inte­gra­tion inter­op­er­abil­i­ty in the rapid­ly grow­ing world of Indus­tri­al Inter­net of Things (IIoT), Indus­trie 4.0 (I4.0), and Machine to Machine (M2M) applications.”