| What
is the OPC Foundation?
OPC Foundation: The Interoperability Standard
for Industrial Automation &
Other Related Domains
The OPC Foundation is
dedicated to ensuring interoperability in automation by creating and
maintaining open specifications that standardize the communication of acquired
process data, alarm and event records, historical data, and batch data to
multi-vendor enterprise systems and between production devices. Production
devices include sensors, instruments, PLCs, RTUs, DCSs, HMIs, historians,
trending subsystems, alarm subsystems, and more as used in the process
industry, manufacturing, and in acquiring and transporting oil, gas, and
minerals.
The Vision of the OPC Foundation is to provide
the best technology, specifications,
certification and processes to enable companies to build
products and services that demonstrate
multiplatform multi-vendor secure reliable
interoperability. OPC Foundation members
benefit by being able to take advantage of the
technology and marketing necessary to become the
leaders in the industry supporting industrial
standards for industrial automation and beyond.
Read through the section
below or jump to History, Vision,
Organization, Board of Directors,
Officers,
Marketing
Committee, Technical
Advisory Council, Technical
Working Groups,
Regional
Organizations, OPC
Foundation Presidential Offices
or Administrative offices.
History
The Foundation currently
has 470 members
(Membership
Demographics) from around the world, including nearly all of the world's major
providers of control systems, instrumentation, and process control systems. The
OPC Foundation's forerunner - a task force composed of Fisher-Rosemount,
Rockwell Software, Opto 22, Intellution, and Intuitive Technology - was able to
develop a basic, workable, OPC specification after only a single year's work. A
simplified, stage-one solution was released in August 1996.
The members of
the task force included the legendary people: Al
Chisholm, David Rehbein, Thomas Burke, Neil
Petersen, Paul VanSlette, Phil White, Rich
Malina, Rich
Harrison, Tom Quinn. These guys all worked for companies that were
competitors of each other, but they all
quickly established great friendships and great
relationships and focused at the task of
developing this specification that was built on
solid technology for interoperability.
Sample code came first, then the
specification essentially documented the sample
code. The OPC task force made sure
that everything was feasible and exceeded the
expectations of all of the vendors to eliminate
any excuses about adoption and building real
products. This was not
an academic exercise in futility; this was about
developing technology that multiple vendors
would quickly adopt
in the interest of multi-vendor interoperability.
The OPC Foundation has
been able to work more quickly than many other standards groups because OPC
Foundation is building on existing, computer industry standards. Other groups
which have had to define standards "from the ground up" have had a more
difficult time reaching consensus as a result of the scope of their work.
OPC started as a vendor
driven initiative to solve the simple device
driver problem, where the first-tier
visualization and SCADA applications needed to
have a standard way for reading and writing data
from devices on the factory floor and DCS
systems in process control. The name OPC
specifically stood for OLE for Process Control,
and quickly changed over the first six months
when the opportunity for standardization in
industrial automation was quickly realized as
being utilized beyond process control.
Factory automation and process control
standardized quickly on the OPC technology.
OPC became the most successful industry standard
actually adopted in industrial automation from a
software perspective.
When we first started OPC the thought pattern
was the hardware companies would always build
the OPC servers for their own respective
hardware since they understood the intimate
details of communicating to their respective
devices. The major HMI vendors would then
build the OPC clients and magically OPC would
provide a standardized communication interface
for the hardware and software to easily work
together in a seamless fashion. Magically
it all came together as OPC quickly release the
first specification as a draft within six months
from conception to completion. Within the
first year, of the initial OPC data access
specification being finalized, there was a
significant groundswell of hardware and software
vendors that all had OPC is the standard
mechanism for interoperability for Microsoft
platforms. Vendors and system integrators
realized a significant opportunity with OPC
opening the door for interoperability. OPC
created a cottage industry whereby many
companies were started using the OPC technology
as their infrastructure for getting their foot
into the door into industrial automation.
Software vendors started building a OPC server
products, and actually began developing
better OPC servers for other people's hardware
and hardware manufacturers themselves.
System integrators started to build their own
custom OPC client applications because we
provided a standard way for them to easily
develop applications that would be able to
communicate with any hardware in factory
automation or process control. It
was so easy it became dangerous everyone and
their brother became an OPC expert.
So the OPC Foundation then put together the
necessary infrastructure to begin doing
interoperability and certification testing and
validation.
The OPC Foundation created a vision of
interoperability based on a solid principle
of success is measured by the level of adoption
of technology. Members have the unique
opportunity to take advantage of the significant
marketing and technical tools that the OPC
Foundation provides to enable rapid deployment
and certification of products based on the
technology.
We are interested in your feedback and want to
know the things that are important to you.
We are truly committed
to providing the best value for our members and
nonmembers alike with respect to providing the
best technology, specifications, certification
and process to enable
plug-and-play multivendor multiplatform secure
reliable interoperability.
 back
to top
Vision
The OPC Foundation vision is focused on the principle of
delivering the best specifications, technology,
certification and process to truly achieve
multivendor multiplatform secure reliable
interoperability for moving data and information
from embedded devices all the way through the
enterprise in industrial automation.
The OPC Foundation is committed to partnering
with consortiums, standards organizations,
suppliers and end-users to facilitate
development of the information models that will
allow plug-and-play interoperability for all
types of data and information for industrial
automation and beyond.
We always talk about data we first started OPC,
but the reality is our talking about data and
metadata, or information about the data
that were moving from embedded devices and
translating into information as it moves from
devices all the way up through the enterprise.
All of the new architectures are focused at
providing information about data such that
things like alarms and historical data are
really nothing but data and information about
that type of data. We have now
standardized on a base set of services for
moving data and information and that's called
OPC UA.
The important thing is everything that the OPC
Foundation does is always backward-compatible
focused at plug-and-play interoperability.
We work with our suppliers to make sure they
develop best-of-breed products and certify
interoperability through self testing,
interoperability workshops and certification
labs.
The vision of
OPC is to be the foundation for
interoperability for moving information
vertically from the factory floor through the enterprise of multi-vendor
systems as well as providing
interoperability between devices on different
industrial networks from different vendors.
back
to top
Organization
The OPC Foundation is governed by a Board of Directors
elected by the membership. The Board, in turn, appoints the Foundation's
Officers and the OPC Chief Architect. A Marketing Committee and
a
Technical Advisory
Council have been established, as have various working
groups. (See the
bylaws for
complete information on the functioning of the organization.)
back
to top
The OPC Foundation Board of Directors has seven members:
Board of Directors
Election
Each year, prior to the General Assembly, nominations for the three or four
available Director positions are accepted. Elections are held either in person
at the General Assembly Meeting or by email voting.
back
to top
Officers
back
to top
back
to top
Technical Advisory Council
 |
Chairperson
-
Karl-Heinz
Deiretsbacher -
Siemens |
|
|
Michel Condemine -
4CE Industry |
|
Wolfgang
Mahnke -
ABB |
|
Matthias Damm -
ascolab |
|
Stefan Hoppe
-
Beckhoff |
|
Mark Rice
-
Canary Labs |
|
Paul
Hunkar -
DSInteroperability |
|
Liam Power -
Embedded Labs |
|
Dirk Thiele-
Emerson Process
Management |
|
Dave Hardin
-
EnerNOC, Inc. |
|
Eric Oursel
-
Euriware |
|
Alisher Maksumov -
GE Global Research |
|
John Gillerman
-
Grid Cloud
Systems |
|
Betsy Hawkinson -
Honeywell |
|
Jan Burian
-
ICONICS |
|
Jim Luth -
Invensys |
|
Tony Paine
-Kepware
Technologies |
|
Rod Stein -MatrikonOPC |
|
Dave Emerson -
MESA |
|
TBD -
Microsoft |
|
Thomas J. Burke -
OPC Foundation |
|
Nathan Pocock -
OPC Foundation |
|
Ondrej Flek
-
Rockwell |
|
Ruediger Fritz -
SAP |
|
Thomas Rummel -
Softing |
|
Toshio Oono-
Yokogawa |
back
to top
Technical
Working Groups
You must be a member of
the OPC Foundation to participate in the OPC Technical Working Groups. Detailed information
about these working groups are found in unique
SharePoint sites that have been created deliberately
as a repository. Members have
complete access to the information in the
SharePoint working groups. This is a
significant opportunity to contribute and help
drive the vision of interoperability by
participating in the various working groups.
There are regular electronic meetings of some of
the working groups. The value
proposition for OPC has always been a success is
measured by the level of adoption of technology,
consequently we are most interested in making
sure that the OPC Foundation is serving the needs of
the members of the OPC Foundation. We are
only interested in developing specifications that solve problems that
our members and end-users want.
Complete information on how to create a
SharePoint account and to have visibility of all of
the OPC Working Groups can be found
here.
Working Groups
currently active are:
(some of the identified groups below are
hyperlinks directly to the SharePoint repository for that respective working group)
|
Analyzer
Device Interface
(ADI) |
|
BACNet Europe
Interest Group
(BACNet) |
|
Compliance
(CMP) |
|
Device Integration (DI) |
|
FDI
(contact
Karl-Heinz Deiretsbacher for
information) |
|
FDT |
|
ISA95 |
|
MES |
|
ODVA,
Machinery Initiative |
|
OPC .NET
4.0 (.NET) |
|
PLCOpen (PLC) |
|
Software
Management Group (SMG) |
|
Unified
Architecture
(UA) |
OPC Foundation Technical Working Groups
Repository Login information may be found at:
SharePointLoginFAQ.
back
to top
Regional Organizations
back
to top
OPC
Foundation
Presidential Offices
Thomas J. Burke, OPC Foundation President &
Executive Director
OPC Foundation
9967 E. Washington
Street, Unit A
Auburn Township, Ohio
44023
USA
Phone: (1) 440 543 2663
Fax: (1) 480
483-7202
e-mail:
OPC Foundation (Thomas Burke)
OPC
Foundation Administrative Offices
Scottsdale
Michael Bryant,
Administrative Director
16101 N. 82nd Street
Suite 3B
Scottsdale, AZ 85260-1830
USA
email:
OPC Foundation (Michael Bryant)
Phone: (1) 480 483-6644
Fax: (1) 480
483-7202
OPC Foundation corporate
e-mail:
office@opcfoundation.org
back
to top
|