Industry leaders and organizations drive interoperability for IIoT and Industry 4.0 applications.
The Avnu Alliance, Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) and OPC Foundation announce their collaboration with IT-OT industry leaders to advance industrial device interoperability and to show the progress made in bringing the open, unified communication standard OPC UA over Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) to market. Leading companies active in these groups have pledged their commitment to ensuring the interoperability of deterministic industrial devices and have made significant investments in achieving this goal. Rapid developments of these technologies have been made over the last year. Through the support of Avnu, IIC and OPC, these leaders come together at SPS IPC Drives to review achievements to date and confirm their commitment to ongoing work into the future.
“With the rapid adoption of TSN as a foundational technology for automation, the community is increasingly relying on an interoperable set of network services and infrastructure. Today, 17 market leaders are reinforcing their commitment to complete a unified communication technology,” said Todd Walter, Avnu Alliance Industrial Segment Chair. “By leveraging the liaison agreements of Avnu, IIC and OPC Foundation, we’re creating a faster process for the creation of an open, interoperable ecosystem of devices that take advantage of secure, guaranteed latency and delivery for critical traffic.”
In particular, the steps achieved include Avnu TSN conformance test plans for time synchronization of industrial devices; the Publish Subscribe extension for OPC UA, now available in release-candidate form, enabling the exchange of OPC UA over UDP connections, and interoperability testing via the IIC TSN Testbed, rapidly progressing with eight hands-on plugfests over the past 18 months. More than 20 companies have participated in these face-to-face events to test and demonstrate interoperability between devices from various manufacturers and vendors – both collaborative and competitive. Many of the devices are already communicating in OPC UA data format. The results from the Testbed plugfests are fed into the conformance testing plans to ensure that the tests exercise the fundamentals of the architecture.
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