Of Cloud Computing, the Internet of Things, and Industry 4.0
Have you heard the latest buzz? Everyone’s talking about Industry 4.0 and how it’s setting the stage for advancing industrial automation beyond where we’ve ever been.
It’s about cyber-physical systems. It’s about multi-platform interoperability. It’s about data and information integration. It’s about communications. It’s about distributed computing. It’s about being innovative. And it’s about the Internet of Things.
Pushing the boundaries of OPC UA is the Fraunhofer IOSB of Lemgo in Germany, whose Prof. Dr.-Ing. Jürgen Jasperneite believes OPC UA will be important for the Internet of Things (see top story). A chip-level prototype OPC UA Server has been developed in just 15Kb of memory (the UA stack is only 10Kb of that), based on the OPC Nano Embedded Device Server Profile and running on the TPC-1 chip from KW Software. The UA transport profile will be adopted next, said Jasperneite. UA client functionality will be important for the smallest devices, as well as for PLCs, so they can move data to the cloud.
We see OPC-UA as an enabler technology!
Its scalability is proven. (Juergen Jasperneite)
For more information visit http://www.opcfoundation.org/opc_connect/Summer_2013/OPC_Connect_Summer_2013.html and http://www.iosb.fraunhofer.de/servlet/is/24313/