What is OPC? - Part I - What you need to know...

a huge thank you to emqx the enterprise broker for sponsoring this video uh what is opc take xero all right so this is not going to be a comprehensive analysis of opc okay this video is being shot for two reasons and two reasons only number one the probably the number one question we get in the industry 4.0 discord server with our customers with vendors is a walker intellic integration 4.0 solutions you guys are really high on mqtt spark plug b and you talk about mqtt spark plug b or mqtt 5 all the time in your architectures where does opc fit where does opc opcua fit why can't i use opcua here and why can i use it in this use case why should i use mqtt right the answer generally is opc ua is not an iiot protocol or standard now the people at the opc foundation would disagree with me they're going to say that it is problem is the opi people at the opc foundation the corporate members the companies that make opc tools they don't do the projects we do okay so engineers who do the actual projects the architects who design the actual projects disagree with the opc foundation about whether or not it's an iot protocol so i'm going to go ahead and explain why it's not an iot protocol i'm not here to bash the opc foundation i'm not here to bash opc ua i'm actually here to celebrate it in many ways but number one i want to shoot this video after a couple of years to give you some updates and i want to give the lay of the land on what opc is what's opc ua what is da what's the history of opc why are they in industry et cetera et cetera number two i want to give a 10 000 foot view for the layperson on what opc is when they hear opcua i want them to have a firm understanding the viewer here i want them to have a firm understanding of what opc is why does it exist why do people use it who manages it what are the actual use cases so that's what we're gonna do right now so what is opc very simple opc is ole for process control object link and embedding for process control okay you're already familiar with ole okay you may not know you're familiar with ole you may not know that but you are back in the early 90s when you were using windows applications ole was the mechanism that microsoft offered in their operating systems for applications to talk to one another to interoperate with one another within the microsoft ecosystem that's object linked and embedding so that's how i could have a piece of software a view the files and the directories that were running in the operating system i could link i could link things that were native to the operating system to pieces of software that we're running in the operating system use ole to do those types of things opc is that mechanism that methodology but for process control for industry okay so opc is an extension of what microsoft created in their operating systems in the late 70s the 80s and the 90s okay opc the standards for opc are managed and written by an organization called the opc foundation okay the opc foundation is not a standalone group they are really a consortium of individual people from various induct companies who have a vested interest in creating an interoperability standard so that their tools can talk to one another okay the opc foundation the president of the opc foundation is a guy named stefan hop he's actually from beckhoff okay so he's a beckoff guy okay microsoft is a major player at the opc foundation rockwell automation is a major player at the opc foundation there are many members of rockwell automation there are many people who work for microsoft there are many people who work for beckhoff who are at the opc foundation okay so the opc foundation is the governing body for the opc standards now how do people use opc like what good is it to the lay person okay so the a common use case in a manufacturing facility i will have plc's operating on the plant floor i may have a beck off plc i may have a rockwell automation allen bradley plc i may have a siemens plc all three of those things running on the same machine okay the same process and what i want to do is i want to create a software layer that helps me to interact with that machine on the plant floor okay beckoff has they have their own controllers they have their own pcs they have their own off software to interact with that machine siemens has their own hardware and then win cc that can talk natively to their own hardware to interact with the siemens component you've got beckoff can natively talk to the beckoff component alan bradley using the factory talk system can natively talk to the alan bradley plcs where opc comes in is where we use standards and tools to make it so that i can have one thing talk to all three okay now there's a couple ways to do that number one i could write a piece of software that can talk the native protocol bekov uses the native protocol that allen bradley uses and the native protocol that siemens uses those companies all use different protocols by the way i could do that but now i've got to manage three different protocols and every time beckoff makes a change i've gotta update the way that i communicate with a beck off and every time allen bradley makes a change i got to update the way that i communicate with alan bradley so and the same thing with siemens it becomes very difficult opc was meant was really meant to make it so that i could make third-party tools to unlock value in my equipment in process control by talking through a common standard okay unfortunately that isn't what happened over time okay a very common use case is you would use a tool like kepware by cap server ex made by made by kepware a company based in maine who's owned by ptc technologies the same people who make thing works they were acquired by ptc a handful of years ago i'll take kept server ex i will purchase the beck off driver i will purchase the allen bradley suite and i'll purchase the siemens driver or i'll purchase the manufacturing suite which gives me all the manufacturing drivers and i'll take that server and i'll connect to beckoff natively over its native protocol i'll connect to the allen bradley over its native protocol and i'll connect to the siemens over its native protocol okay and then what i will do is i will build out a namespace inside of kept server that organizes the tags the information inside those devices hierarchically hierarchically right so i may create a beckoff folder and i'll create an allen bradley folder and i will create a siemens folder now the way that kept server already does that they create this using the device they do it automatically okay kept server ex is an opc server that supports many elements of the opc ua standard which we will i'm gonna i'm gonna do a graphical representation of the opc standard here in a second i'm gonna steal something that jeff schrader one of the the members of our community did i'm gonna it'll look familiar to what he did since that's already something he's published i want to keep our comparisons in line okay so that the community's already seen this all right and then what kept server will do once i'm connected i've created all my i've brought my tags in i've created my hierarchy and i'm getting those values updated what kept server will do is it will expose the namespace that's running in kep server using opcua using the opcua standard kepware will expose the namespace of all the tags out to any opc client now in a later video i'm going to show you how an opc client under the hood connects to a server and what are all the things that have to happen in order to connect find the data that i'm looking for and retrieve that data either set up a subscription or do an explicit read to extract it okay so the use case that i just gave you is the most common use case for using the opc standard however in terms of the total standard if i go to opcfoundation.org and i read the entire standard so i read opc classic which was the original standard written in the 90s it's based on com and dcom dcom has gone away and but opc classic standard was based on the technology from the 90s and the early 2000s opc standard is based on technology that was developed in the 2000 it comes to now i'm going to talk a lot about you'll hear me say listen opcua is not the future of iiot all the time and in a nutshell it boils down to really three things why it's not the future of iot and i'm explaining that right now one of those reasons is that because the opc ua standard has too many remnants of the classic standard and we call that technical debt in our world and it makes engineers job difficult to do these integrations that's reason number one reason number two is that the opc foundation while its mission is for interoperability of industrial systems in practice what they're doing is allowing the companies the corporations who help write the standard to make it easy for them to sell their products and steer you towards their solutions and not to make it easy for their solutions to interoperate with one another here's an outstanding example okay if you go and look at the i think there are something like 600 members of the opc foundation globally that is 600 companies partners who make opc tools okay you would think that if i've got 600 members i could easily buy all 600 of their tools and i could connect all of them together seamlessly why because they're all partners they all help to write the standard they all sit on the committees they all write the companion specs together one would think that if i had all 600 of those people working together and they all made their own product we could connect all those products together and they could seamlessly interoperate and the answer is that simply isn't the case in many cases products made that have the opc label on them that only use one part of the specification will not interoperate with another product that's got the opc label on it that's using a completely different part of the specification they won't even there will be no value gleaned from connecting the two together to try to pass data and information back and forth from one another okay that's number two so number two is the corporations are focused more on how they benefit and less on how the consumer benefits from the opc ua standard okay and number three the opc foundation is a highly bureaucratic organization and there are many members of the organization who are more focused on their role within the organization as opposed to their providing effective tools okay so those are the three fundamental reasons why opc ua is not the future of iot that doesn't mean that opc the opc foundation doesn't do god's work okay it doesn't mean that they're not doing god's work it doesn't mean that they don't work hard it doesn't mean that they're not smart but it does mean that if you chart the path between the mid 90s to now of the opc foundation and the opc standard they drew an error vector in the beginning that put them going in the wrong direction and they haven't corrected okay so what is opc okay in the subsequent videos i'm actually going to chart things out here in the next video kind of what does an opc architecture look like opc is ole for process control that's object linking and embedding and it's an extension of the microsoft framework from the 90s and it's meant specifically for industry it's a way for applications to interoperate with one another it was meant to basically create an open industry standard for hardware and software but unfortunately that isn't what it is okay and we're going to talk about that in subsequent videos all right guys and gals thanks for reaching to the end of this video now is when we're going to talk about the sponsor of this video series emq but first i have a little bit of homework for you guys i want you to actually first go online go to the opc foundation website and then also in another tab i want you to pull up emq's website emqx dot io and i want you to just kind of compare the two now it looks like the opc foundation's website is from the 90s or early 2000s at best now this is not a some secret ploy to get you to go to emqx's website this is actually to show you the differences in the technology that we're talking about emqx what's important and what you need to know is that it's why to use emqx it's open source massively scalable you can connect tens of millions of iot devices it's cloud native and it has elastic capacity to scale up or scale down in our opinion it is one of the best-in-class brokers for enterprise applications and so go to mqx.io thanks for supporting sponsor and thank you emqx for sponsoring this series and thank you for watching

Channel: 4.0 Solutions

Views: 10,710

Keywords: intellic integration, walker reynolds, intellic, iiot, industry 4.0, digital factory, digital transformation, what is OPC?, what is OPC-UA?, OPC-UA use cases, MQTT Use Cases, mqtt for industry, unified namespace, is opc the future of iiot, iiot protocols, opc-ua vs mqtt, mqtt sparkplugb

Id: ApxtnOTVbzY

Length: 12min 44sec (764 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 18 2021