Interoperable functional safety with OPC UA is becoming a reality
Scottsdale, AZ – March 9th, 2020 – The OPC UA Safety working group has achieved a key milestone publishing Release 1.00 of the specification for the interoperable communication standard for functional safety – “OPC UA Safety – Part 15” specification”. OPC UA Safety is based on the black channel principle and currently addresses controller-to-controller communication using OPC UA client/server.
OPC UA has progressively expanded the applications that can be served by the technology. Safety is the next important part of the OPC UA specification family and is now achievable. OPC UA Safety takes the requirements of modern and future safety technology into account.
While addressing all safety requirements defined in the relevant international standards, OPC UA builds on experience from existing safety protocols and addresses new use cases that have emerged since their development. For instance, OPC UA Safety supports the assignment of Safety-IDs to series machines and allows for dynamically changing the communication partner during runtime: a prerequisite for modern production processes with batch size 1, where machines or machine parts must be re-grouped frequently. OPC UA Safety enables the transmission of up to 1,500 bytes of arbitrarily structured data in any network without limiting data rate for applications with a safety integrity level (SIL) of up to 4.
The OPC UA Safety working group has started as a joint working group between OPC Foundation and PROFIBUS&PROFINET International (PI) and is at the same time a technical working group under the auspices of the Field Level Communication Initiative. Many well-known manufacturers are represented in the OPC UA Safety working group which ensures a uniform, worldwide and coordinated standard for safe communication developed for the first time. OPC UA Safety now becomes a core part of OPC UA specification framework of OPC Foundation. The next steps include defining of safety test specification for certification as well as extension to OPC UA Pub/Sub allowing real-time and isochronous real-time applications.
About OPC Foundations FLC Initiative:
The following companies are members of the OPC Foundations’ FLC Steering Committee, providing both technical and much appreciated financial support:
ABB, Beckhoff, Rexroth, B&R, Cisco, Festo, Hilscher, Hirschmann, Huawei, Intel, Kalycito, Kuka, Lenze, Mitsubishi Electric, Molex, Moxa, Murrelektronik, Omron, Phoenix Contact, Pilz, Rockwell Automation, Schneider Electric, Siemens, TTTech , Wago, Yokogawa
The FLC working groups are open to all OPC Foundation members.
About the OPC Foundation:
Since 1996, the OPC Foundation has facilitated the development and adoption of the OPC information exchange standards. As both advocate and custodian of these specifications, the Foundation’s mission is to help industry vendors, end-users, and software developers maintain interoperability in their manufacturing and automation assets. The OPC Foundation is dedicated to providing the best specifications, technology, process, and certification to achieve multivendor, multiplatform, secure, reliable, interoperability for moving data and information from the embedded world to the enterprise cloud. The Foundation serves over 770 members worldwide in the Industrial Automation, IT, IoT, IIoT, M2M, Industrie 4.0, Building Automation, machine tools, pharmaceutical, petrochemical, and Smart Energy sectors.
For more information about the OPC Foundation, please visit www.opcfoundation.org
For more information, contact:
Peter Lutz
Director Field Level Communications
OPC Foundation
Peter.Lutz@OPCFoundation.org
Stefan Hoppe
President and Executive Director
OPC Foundation
Stefan.Hoppe@OPCFoundation.org
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