Interoperability and open communications in industrial automation were the topics of conversation in the latest episode of IoT Unplugged, on which Stefan Hoppe, President and Executive Director of the OPC Foundation featured.
The mission of the Foundation is to develop and maintain the OPC UA foundation, but Hoppe also touched upon the running thread of collaboration within the podcast, at the core of the Foundation’s efforts, which partners with over 60 organisations globally. These partnerships span diverse sectors, including manufacturing, IT, cloud connectivity, and cybersecurity, ensuring that OPC UA’s solutions are robust, flexible, and scalable.
Hoppe emphasised achieving interoperability requires having consensus on semantics and data exchange protocols. OPC UA, which itself has evolved as a standard, includes support for modern communication patterns like PubSub and integration with protocols like MQTT.
Real-world applications of OPC UA demonstrate its versatility, such as connecting wind turbine parks in Germany; integrating over a billion data points in Norway’s oil and gas industry; and powering car manufacturer Renault’s digital manufacturing metaverse in France.
Looking ahead, Hoppe said he anticipated OPC AU’s continued growth in the industrial automation sector and its expansion into future sectors such as renewable energy, commercial equipment and IT applications. Projects like the EU’s digital product passport for batteries highlight OPC UA’s potential to address interoperability challenges beyond traditional manufacturing.
“The technology is available, all of the building blocks available,” said Hoppe, “I believe the main barrier is us, human beings, and this mentality where we want to reinvent the wheel, ‘the standard has not been made by me … I want to create something new bnd be the first’. OPC UA is the biggest ecosystem of industrial interoperability and ecosystems are important.”
Concluding, Hoppe shared that cybersecurity is a core tenet of their standard, and that without security, interoperability has no value.
If you’d like to learn more about the OPC Foundation and the OPC AU standard, tune into the full podcast episode, which is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and at the link below.
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