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Top Six Benefits of OPC UA for End-Users
 Thomas Burke, president and executive director of the OPC Foundation, discusses why end-users are discovering the benefits of an OPC UA solution, including reliability, performance, multi-platform support and easy migration.
Welcome to the August 2009 edition of OPConnect, the official newsletter of the OPC Foundation. There have been a lot of things happening in 2009, and it's been very exciting with respect to OPC Foundation and the OPC vendor community.
One of the most significant things is the recognition by the end-users of the value proposition for the OPC Unified Architecture (UA) technology.
There are six key features that OPC UA delivers to the end-users:
The ease-of-use, plug-and-play, high reliability and redundancy, enhanced performance, multiplatform support, and easy migration plan for existing OPC products to the OPC UA technology.
That last feature–easy migration plan–is critical to its success. Even though OPC UA is a revolutionary new architecture, it still provides a rock-solid evolutionary migration mechanism to allow existing OPC products to plug in and get many of the benefits of the OPC UA technology... Read more
 OPC UA Interoperability Proves Worth For Pharma
Gary Mintchell, Editor in Chief, Automation World, discusses one of the key features of OPC UA technology–interoperability–and the promise this holds to significantly reduce integration costs across complex systems.
Integrating various components of an automation system can cost up to ten times the price of just the components, depending upon the complexity of the system. This fact alone can destroy the benefits of an integrated system. The latest specification from the OPC Foundation–OPC UA–holds the potential of greatly reducing this cost penalty. All we need is for more suppliers to adopt the specification and make it available to those charged with implementing an integrated automation system... Read more
 OPC Server Meets Demand for 64-Bit Systems
New OPC server suites from Cyberlogic have 64-bit kernel mode device drivers, so users can deploy 64-bit systems regardless of the type of network or network adapter.
Cyberlogic has released 64-bit versions of the company's OPC server suites that deliver an easy migration path for users moving to x64 Windows platforms. The 64-bit versions of Cyberlogic OPC suites provide native 64-bit support, including 64-bit kernel-mode device drivers, for all x64 Windows operating systems, including XP, Vista, Server 2003, and Server 2008.
As the shift toward 64-bit systems is speeding up, there is a growing demand for the 64-bit versions of popular software tools. Complicating the picture is the fact that some of the new 64-bit systems may have to be deployed in existing environments, either as replacements or for expansion... Read more
 Integrating OPC Servers and SCADA Systems
Engineers working on a high-security project in Denmark used the OPC DataHub, from Cogent Real-Time Systems, for OPC client connections between equipment at the secure facility and a remote monitoring station.
In a recent data integration project, Siemens engineers in Copenhagen, Denmark, were able to connect equipment and instrumentation running in a high-security facility to a remote monitoring location using the OPC DataHub. The goal was to allow technicians access to the machines they needed to work on, without breaching security or permitting any non-authorized personnel on site.
At first the project promised to be a typical OPC application. The main objective was to connect a chiller unit with an OPC server running at a secure facility to two SCADA systems at a monitoring station, each enabled as an OPC client. However, it soon became apparent that there would be some problems with networking. OPC networking depends on distributed component object model (DCOM), which at the best of times can be difficult to configure and slow to reconnect after a network break. To make matters worse, the OPC server provided by the chiller manufacturer was not up to the task... Read more
 Process Analytics Finds Process Problems
In this whitepaper, Canary Labs outlines how companies, by using process analytical software, can gain great insight into their process operations to find problems and improve quality.
Process Analytics and Intelligence–sometimes called Manufacturing Intelligence–has transformed the way companies produce goods, understand their manufacturing processes, and ensure a quality product in ways we could not have foreseen ten years ago. Process Analytics and Intelligence can take many forms–from basic trend charts that highlight a single process variable to complex statistical analysis of multiple variables. Trending process variables allows you to go back in time and see what happened over the past minutes, hours, overnight, or over a weekend. When trend charts show that the data from the system is not typical, you can quickly determine the problem and resolve it before it becomes a major problem.
The cornerstone of any real-time Process Analytical and Intelligence solution is an effective data storage and retrieval capability. In manufacturing applications, data is generated from a multitude of sources, from devices as simple as a weigh scale to as complex as a PLC controlling a high speed bottling line... Read more
 OPC Facilitates Increased Capacity
A water treatment plant in Utah doubled its capacity after deploying the System 800xA Extended Automation from ABB, which uses OPC 2.0 technology to gather and display data.
Quail Creek Water Treatment Plant (Quail Creek WTP) is part of Washington Counties' Water Conservancy District, a political subdivision of the State of Utah. It is a regional water supply agency organized in 1962 under the Water Conservancy Act to develop a water supply for rapidly growing areas in Utah's Washington County. The District is primarily a wholesaler of water to other agencies. The main role of the District is to develop or purchase water where it is available for its service area. The District is committed to serving its water customers in an efficient and cost-effective manner. The District serves water on a retail basis only when other local providers are not available or do not have facilities to do so. It is dedicated to development of a resource in an environmentally sound manner.
The Quail Creek Water Treatment Plant's control system was in need of an upgrade in order to fulfill the District's goals of efficient, cost-effective and environmentally sound operations... Read more
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