The OPC Foundation’s European Interoperability (IOP) Workshop continued its long string of successes with the recent IOP held in Nuremberg, Germany, the week of October 22, 2012. The event, hosted by Siemens AG for the past 14 years, drew about 35 participants representing organizations from countries throughout Europe. Of special note at this year’s workshop—every participating company tested one or more OPC UA products. A total of 60 OPC UA products (Servers and Clients) and about 60 OPC Classic products (DA, A&E, HDA and XML-DA) were put through the rigorous IOP test process.
The OPC Foundation sponsors three major IOP Workshops annually; each event is hosted by the regional OPC councils in Europe, Asia and North America.
Testing is monitored by the IOP test application—a web application that accesses the test database for registration information and storage of test results. “Every OPC product being tested is connected to a network,” says Karl Deiretsbacher, Director of Interoperability Testing for the OPC Foundation. “This configuration creates a mesh where servers and clients can be connected to each other at the same time.”
Client vendors can inspect each server for interfaces, capabilities and restrictions. For each test combination they walk through the test cases defined in the IOP test-application, where they feed back their results.
At the Europe IOP, the event organizer also made available:
• A certificate authority (CA) and the ability to issue a proper CA certificate to every participant.
• A standard test scenario for each server.
• Compliance testing on request.
The IOP Workshop is a great resource for preparing a product for OPC Certification testing. When a product is certified by the OPC Foundation, it is because the product has been rigorously tested in an independent Certification Test Lab for compliance, interoperability, robustness and recovery, usability, and resource efficiency (load-testing over 36 hours).
In attendance were major automation providers, OPC Toolkit providers, MES/ERP vendors, system integrators and institutes, including these companies and organizations: ascolab GmbH, Bachmann electronic, Beckhoff Automation, Bosch, Fraunhofer IOSB, HB-Softsolution, ICONICS, InduSoft, Ing.-Buero Allmendinger, MS Industrie AG, OPC Foundation, OPC Labs, OSIsoft, Progea, Prosys, SAP, Siemens, Softing, TerxaSoft and Unified Automation.
For more information about the OPC Foundation Interoperability Workshops, please click here.
