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Interoperability of Manufacturing Control and Web Based Facility Management Systems: Trends, Technologies, & Case Studies
Published in Barney L. Capehart, Timothy Middelkoop, Paul J. Allen, David C. Green, Handbook of Web Based Energy Information and Control Systems, 2020
Today, the OPC standards comprise a wide range of specifications for exchange of different types of information between automation/manufacturing control software. When the OPC Foundation was first started in 1996, the first standard created was the OPC Data Access (OPC DA) standard. Prior to the OPC Data Access standard, every company that provided applications that needed data from the shop floor had to write their own communications software for the myriad of device types. (Figure 27-4). This resulted in a great deal of excess work done in the market and a wide variance of functionality and quality in the communications software offered by each vendor providing software that interfaced with the plant floor.
Open Platform Communications (OPC)
Published in Chanchal Dey, Sunit Kumar Sen, Industrial Automation Technologies, 2020
The first standard was released by OPC Foundation in 1996. In 2011, OPC Foundation changed its name to Open Platform Communications. OPC is a series of standard specifications, the first one being ‘OPC Data Access’ or OPC DA specification. OPC defines a control and automation data exchange (DX) standard that supports process control instrumentation. Thus, OPC has become a de facto communication vehicle for DX for process automation and control fields.
Communication method for manufacturing services in a cyber–physical manufacturing cloud
Published in International Journal of Computer Integrated Manufacturing, 2018
S. M. Nahian Al Sunny, Xiaoqing F. Liu, Md Rakib Shahriar
OLE for Process Control (OPC) is a significant of many manufacturing networks at higher levels by offering a standardised interface for communication of industrial data. Maintained by the OPC Foundation, The OPC specification has combined object linking and embedding (OLE), component object model (COM), and distributed component object model (DCOM) technologies developed by Microsoft (Leitner and Mahnke 2006). The OPC specification outlined a standard set of objects, interfaces, and methods for use in process control and manufacturing automation applications to facilitate interoperability. OPC data access (OPC DA) is the most commonly used OPC specification, which is used to read and write real-time data. It allows real-time communication of process values over Ethernet with a client-server model. Several other variants of OPC have also been developed, including OPC historical data access which permits for acquiring stored values, OPC data exchange for two-way communication using a server-server model and OPC XML Data Access, which uses XML for communication. Later in 2006, the OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA) has been specified and was being tested and implemented through its Early Adopters program. OPC UA (IEC 62541) combines the functionality of the existing OPC interfaces with new technologies such as XML and Web Services to deliver higher level manufacturing execution system (MES) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) support. OPC and OPC UA provided the opportunity of accessing machine tool not only from factory floor but also from outside the factory. In recent years, MTConnect has acquired much acknowledgements after the release of its version 1.0 in 2008 (Vijayaraghavan et al. 2008). MTConnect is designed to enhance interoperability of manufacturing machines by providing a uniform XML-based data reporting structure. It is fundamentally a read-only framework, i.e. its principal focus is data monitoring and analysis. MTConnect enables manufacturing machines to be monitored over the Internet. The primary objective of MTConnect is to create a universal machine language that is understandable to all machines and also to the users. MTConnect provides a RESTful interface – there is no need of establishing any session or logon/logoff sequence to acquire data. As MTConnect is not designed for any specific type of machines, several types of manufacturing resources such as CNC machine, industrial robot, milling machine, 3D printer (Liu, Sunny, et al. 2016) currently are made compatible with MTConnect standard. In 2010, The OPC Foundation and the MTConnect Institute declared a cooperation to ensure interoperability and consistency between the two standards (ThomasNet 2010). AutomationML (Automation Markup Language) is another promising upcoming open standard series (IEC 62714) for the description of production plants and plant components (Drath et al. 2008). AutomationML describes the contents – what is exchanged between the parties and systems involved. It helps to model plants and plant components with their skills, topology, interfaces, and relations to others, geometry, kinematics, and even logic and behaviour. A joint working group of the AutomationML e.V. and the OPC Foundation deals with the creation of a companion specification ‘AutomationML in OPC UA’ (Henssen and Schleipen 2014).