The improvement of jobs is the securing of jobs.
Imagine the following, you are a plant manager, sitting in your office and just racking your brains to figure out how to save your site. If you don’t succeed, the entire production will be relocated to Asia ❌. This scenario motivates many decision-makers today and drives digitization forward.
Today, machines not only produce goods, but also create „data value“. I call it the invisible gold, the raw material of the digital age. The management of these participants in the value chain takes place in the network. On the one hand, it requires strong/open standards and, on the other hand, a high-performance and open/strong system architecture.
For the exchange of information in industrial machine communication, the Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture is particularly suitable. OPC-UA is not just a protocol, but an architecture that works scalably from small embedded controllers to large cloud infrastructures. There are two mechanisms for exchanging data with OPC-UA: the client-server model and the publisher-subscriber model.
Important features of OPC-UA are:
✔︎ HEARTBEAT – Connection monitoring in both directions
✔︎ BUFFERING – OPC-UA technology recovers missed data after a connection termination
✔︎ SECURE – encryption is integrated into the protocol
Personally, I think OPC-UA is the right way for Industry 4.0, and in practice we have found that it is extremely tedious for developers to learn OPC-UA. Therefore we see it as our task to make it easier for software developers. For this purpose we have built the software translator KONEKTILO ✅, with which OPC-UA can be simultaneously translated to REST.
The mechanical engineering needs good software, only together we can stabilize the location of manufacturing companies.
Have fun 🏄🏽♂️ Roman
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