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OPC Foundation Opens Certification Lab
 Thomas Burke, president and executive director of the OPC Foundation, outlines the Foundation's major milestones for 2009, including a new certification lab in Scottsdale, Ariz., and the complete release of the OPC Unified Architecture and companion specifications.
Welcome to the March 2009 edition of OPConnect, the official newsletter of the OPC Foundation. We've updated our look this year and have included more need-to-know information on OPC, the leading open connectivity standard for interoperable communications. In each issue of OPConnect, you'll find case applications, automation technology updates, important whitepapers and new product highlights. Join us as we develop and apply OPC solutions that solve real-world problems.
What's more apparent today than ever before is the importance of secure, reliable interoperability in manufacturing systems. Manufacturers simply don't have the time or money to troubleshoot a solution of mismatched components and standards. The OPC Foundation is very active in making sure we develop the necessary specifications and technology that members and nonmembers can successfully adapt into real products that work together to solve application problems... Read more
 ABB Supports New OPC Analyzer Integration Spec
ABB plans to release products against the OPC-ADI specification, which provides a common method for data exchange for analyzer data models for process and laboratory analyzers.
Within ABB's Industrial IT solutions for Process Analytical Technology (PAT) and automation, interoperability with analyzers is assured by a common configurator and industry standard analyzer interfaces based on OPC Unified Architecture technology.
Analyzer integration for PAT presents a unique set of challenges. There is a large variety of analyzers, supplied by multiple vendors, which provides many different types of critical data. The best way to accomplish the level of analyzer integration required for PAT is through broadly adopted, open standards... Read more
 Manufacturer Uses OPC to Power Excel Spreadsheets
A maker of electric mirror adjustment actuators upgrades its automation system with OPC DataHub from Cogent Real-Time Systems, simplifying data flow to an Excel workbook and improving reliability.
Mirror Controls international (MCi) designs, develops, and manufactures electric mirror adjusting actuators and electric power-folding mirror actuators. With sales in excess of 40 million units per year, MCi is the largest independent manufacturer of actuators in the world. Their plant in Manorhamilton, Ireland, supplies major European automotive companies such as BMW, Volkswagen, Jaguar, Rolls Royce, and Ford. This facility recently upgraded its automation system by implementing the OPC DataHub from Cogent Real-Time Systems... Read more
 Big Oil Discovers a Slick OPC Solution
Several leading oil companies, including ExxonMobil, Chevron and BP, are using OPC Crosslink from Cyberlogic to manage OPC data, by bridging data between OPC servers, configuring redundant servers and configuring data concentrators.
The oil giants ExxonMobil, Chevron and BP are increasingly turning to compliance-certified OPC technology from Cyberlogic to aggregate information from legacy OPC servers and build reliable, redundant information systems that can handle volumes of data efficiently.
The key technology is the Cyberlogic OPC Crosslink Suite, which Cyberlogic unveiled as part of its Version 7 release to complement its best-selling OPC server suite products. “Our customers in the oil industry are finding that OPC Crosslink is designed to do three things extremely well,” says Dan Muller, Cyberlogic's Director of Product Development... Read more
 OPC Feeds Data from PLC to DCS
A paper mill in Turkey uses Kepware Technologies' LinkMaster and KEPServerEX OPC Server to transfer data from a Siemens programmable controller to an ABB distributed control system.
The Georgia Pacific paper mill in Yalova, Turkey, was faced with a few problems at the plant. In the water treatment portion, the paper plant was using a Siemens programmable logic controller (PLC) and needed to feed data into an ABB Advant OCS.
At first, the paper mill wanted to connect in a classic way, using Profibus to link the Siemens PLC to the ABB Advant OCS. This type of connection can be very costly and time consuming to set up. The Profibus connection has complex programming requirements, and the distributed control system controller, when connecting to a slave, had to restart itself. Restarting the DCS controller, which may have to be done multiple times, stops the mill production each time... Read more
 OPC Goes Embedded
The latest OPC technology Unified Architecture enables integration of OPC standards into embedded systems, allowing OPC data services to be tightly coupled with real-time control applications.
With the release of the OPC Unified Architecture, the OPC Foundation has finished a five-year development process of the new standardized communication and information exchange platform. The new architecture incorporates proven concepts from the successful OPC standards for access to current data, alarms and events, and historical data, but unifies them and provides solution for additional OPC use cases. Platform-independent technology allows the deployment of OPC UA beyond current OPC applications only running on Microsoft Windows-based PC systems. OPC UA can be directly integrated into embedded systems as well as into Linux/UNIX-based enterprise systems. The provided information can be generically modelled and therefore arbitrary information models can be provided using OPC UA... Read more
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