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OPC Training Events Back on Track in 2010
 Thomas Burke, president and executive director of the OPC Foundation, announces the resumption of OPC training events for 2010 and previews a development effort to adapt legacy OPC solutions to the Microsoft .NET environment.
Welcome to the November 2009 edition of OPConnect, the official newsletter of the OPC Foundation. 2009 has been a very challenging year economically for both the OPC Foundation and for many of the OPC Foundation members. Because of the recession, we put our road show program on hold this year, as well as the OPC Foundation's participation in many of the industry trade shows. What we learned was that these events are very important to vendors and end-users in the marketing and evangelism of the OPC vision... Read more
 OPC UA Connects Wind Turbines in Offshore Wind Park
Built-in security and an authentication mechanism were the determining factors in choosing OPC UA solutions from Unified Automation for Germany's first offshore wind mill park.
Unified Automation's Software Development Kit (SDK) was the favored technology to integrate OPC UA in Alpha Ventus, an offshore wind park test site in the North Sea. OPC Unified Architecture is ensuring fast, reliable and secure communication with onshore control applications and enterprise information systems.
Permanently strong and steady wind guarantees effective wind energy generation 45 kilometers from the German coast. Each wind mill is designed as an autonomous, fully automated, self-monitoring energy plant. Offshore wind parks, built far away from the coast and waterways, have very low environmental impact. They must run under rough conditions like humidity, salt and extreme temperatures and their autonomous control system must guarantee effective operation at all times... Read more
 Using the OPC DataHub to Bypass Firewalls
Software Toolbox supported the implementation of the OPC DataHub for OPC tunneling at the Aberdeen facility of Total E&P, with the goal to network OPC servers and clients securely, across corporate firewalls.
Total Exploration and Production (Total E&P) is a subsidiary of the Total Group, operating in more than 120 countries worldwide. Total E&P is among the largest oil and gas producers on the UK Continental Shelf. The Aberdeen, Scotland, headquarters of Total E&P employs about 750 people, and operates or owns significant interests in the Alwyn Area fields in the UK Northern North Sea, the Elgin Franklin Area fields in the Central Graben Area North Sea, and the St. Fergus Gas Terminal on the north east coast of Scotland.
For the past several years, production engineers at the Aberdeen facility have been using the OPC protocol to gather data at their terminals. Recently their management asked them to connect the terminal system to the corporate networks, to gain access to valuable production data in real time. When the engineering team set about making the connection, they soon ran into the problem that many others have experienced: OPC works well on a single machine, but not so well over networks, particularly firewalled networks like theirs... Read more
 OPC UA Toolkits Support Multiple Operating Systems
Softing's new OPC Unified Architecture toolkit sets support Windows, VxWorks and Linux operating systems, and include OPC libraries to develop OPC Clients and Servers.
Softing, the world leader in providing conformant OPC development tools, has announced its new OPC Unified Architecture (UA) Toolkits that will be available in the fourth quarter of 2009. The latest version of the OPC UA Toolkit set support the following operating systems out-of-the-box: Windows, VxWorks, and Linux.
Softing's Toolkits are currently the only products available that include all necessary OPC libraries to develop OPC Clients and Servers based on the Classic OPC Data Access (DA), Alarms & Events, XML-DA, and the OPC UA specification... Read more
 Micro Historian Gets You Out of an Excel of a Mess
When an Excel spreadsheet is not enough, and a central process historian is too much, the MatrikonOPC Micro Historian is just right as the cost-effective solution for long-term storage of process data.
Off-line analysis of historical process data is an integral part of process optimization and production reporting. Although many organizations have database systems in place for business automation, a substantial percentage of end users are still creating Excel sheets to store and manipulate data. Spreadsheets and other common log file formats are not designed to store long-term data. Such applications do not have adequate support for maintaining data integrity, validations, relations and other features. Using OPC applications designed for each task enables users to follow data management best practices of separating data visualization from data storage... Read more
 ASU Gets Greener through Visibility
Kepware's KEPServerEX was chosen as the best OPC Server-based communication solution for a university's energy savings and education program that reduced energy usage by 20 percent across campus.
As the old adage says, if you don't measure it, you can't control it. That is the fundamental principle behind Arizona State University's energy monitoring system. At ASU they take it one large step further—they show it off to the world.
Energy costs are a major factor in Arizona, both in the summer and the winter. ASU is the equivalent of a small city, with a population of 69,000. In the world of Greener Thinking, universities play an important role in educating the citizens of the future. ASU takes this responsibility very seriously.
ASU has been a long-time proponent of Greener Thinking and has taken steps in many areas, from 1.3 Megawatts of photovoltaic panels to generate supplemental AC power, to running its own 7 Megawatt power plant for the generation of electric power. In addition, the ASU Tempe Campus runs two chilled water plants to assist in the cooling of various campus buildings. All this energy use is made visible through ASU's Energy Information System and a Campus Metabolism website... Read more
 3 Steps to OPC UA: Model, Bind and Run
The CAS Unified Architecture Address Space Model Designer (ASMD) is a software tool to help engineers and developers achieve OPC UA connectivity in three steps, without extensive custom programming.
One of the main goals of the OPC Unified Architecture is to expose information that can be used by clients to manage an underlying real-time process and the entire business enterprise as a whole. The main challenges include integrating the automation systems (e.g. programmable logic controllers—PLCs, distributed control systems—DCSs and SCADA systems) and the business management systems (e.g. ERP, MES, GIS) into one homogenous environment. Clients usually need only a select part of the available information at any time. To meet this requirement, the published information must be well organized and selectively available as addressable entities called nodes. The collection of these nodes exposed by the OPC UA Server is called the Address Space, and the description of the Address Space organization is called the Information Model... Read more
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