Drives&Controls & BACK TO BASICS n SPONSORED BY Has the ‘everything protocol’ finally arrived? Proprietary standards and competing communications protocols have created an ecosystem where integrating different automation technologies is not always as easy as it might be. However, with the emergence of OPC UA, that might be about to change, argues ABB’s Industrial Automation product manager, Carl Eely. Everyone wants more data about their plant operations. The more data you have, the more you can analyse and optimise. IoT devices are everywhere, and are only going to become more ubiquitous in the future. Meanwhile, advances in cloud computing are opening up almost limitless opportunities to leverage data across plant operations. However, building such an architecture can present obstacles, particularly with the vast array of different communications protocols that each device, or group of devices, uses. Even if your field devices can talk to each other, they may not be able to communicate seamlessly up the hierarchy to PLCs, Scada systems and beyond. This could be about to change with the emergence of OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA). This communication protocol for industrial automation is designed specifically to be cross-platform and opensource, allowing integration from field-level devices, all the way up to cloud applications. This brings some significant advantages. Not only can devices using OPC UA talk to each other at a local level, but they can also communicate all the way up and down the chain using the same protocol. In practice, this enables more reliable control networks, and allows secure data collection from multiple systems at the same time. Consider, for example, a system where you have a robot with a PLC sitting above it, a Scada system above that, a Manufacturing Execution System (MES), an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, and then up to the cloud. Previously you might have needed different protocols all the way up the chain, but with OPC UA you just need the one protocol. Of course, there is still a place for other protocols, especially in point-to-point communications, but anything that makes adoption of automation easier generally has to be a good thing. Crucially, OPC UA has widespread industry support. At ABB, we include it as standard in our PLCs, and plenty of other vendors do so too. OPC UA is not the first attempt to unify under a single standard, but it is the most widely adopted of any to date. This has been the holy grail of automation products for years – moving away from proprietary protocols and needing to buy additional protocols for every point-to-point, towards a single unifying architecture. OPC UA also includes certificate-based encryption, which can provide more robust security compared to patching several different protocols together. For more information, search for “ABB OPC UA”. applicat for ov reliable Super r f rmo tions ving cables online stock, p huge UK pricing K tions,
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