In an increasingly connected world, machine manufacturers and end-users are finding the digital components of "smart" machines increasingly complex, and processing this data becoming more and more challenging. Industry trends are focused on themes such as modularly connected machines, the Industrial Internet of Things ( IIoT), plug-and-play, digital twins, and digital factories. The development of motion control applications, and the industry itself, is rapidly changing.
Looking ahead, with the rapid development of the manufacturing industry, Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) face challenges related to standardized communication and interoperability in order to succeed and meet the growing expectations of manufacturers. End users are purchasing machines from different manufacturers and dealing with varying control platforms and fieldbuses, as well as related industrial networking issues. Since machines need to be interconnected to build production lines, they should also be connected to the cloud.
When a company purchases one machine from OEM A and another from OEM B, the expectation is that the machines should be able to communicate easily without requiring extensive engineering to achieve this. For end-users and machine manufacturers, smart industrial networks enable efficient and rapid implementation and facilitate data-driven operational optimization.
The following standards are playing a significant role in driving the development of the IIoT. Recent advancements in Open Application Programming Interfaces (OPIs) are noteworthy, including the following standards and protocols that can improve interoperability.
OPCUA and TSN
Any machine manufacturer or OEM implementing a cloud-based solution will be able to quickly operate within the Open Platform Communications (OPC) Foundation and its Unified Architecture (UA) specification. Released in 2008, OPCUA is a scalable, open platform technology that enables better security and data modeling as the manufacturing industry begins to explore more service-oriented architectures.
As machine-level data generation increases, network architectures must grow and evolve accordingly. The capacity and performance of standard Ethernet and Industrial Ethernet may not keep pace with these evolving needs. OPCUATSN, released in 2018, provides a vendor-agnostic communication infrastructure for industrial automation based on open standards.
OPCUA maps to IECTSN, enabling “real-time” (or near-real-time) communication between different machines, controllers, clouds, and other IT solutions. The overall communication infrastructure created by these specifications is perhaps the closest thing to anything anyone can see—an evolution that will influence the design and development of future motion-controlled machines.
MQTT
OPCUATSN is a broad protocol that can guide the entire system, while Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) is a lighter-weight protocol that allows two applications to communicate with each other. MQTT is typically implemented within a single product. For example, MQTT allows sensors or actuators to extract information from a product and send it to the cloud. MQTT is considered a fundamental messaging protocol for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and was approved in 2016 and globally accepted as an ISO/IEC standard (20922). Therefore, MQTT is often used as part of larger system standards.
OMACPackML
The Organization for Machine Automation and Control (OMAC) is a group of end-users, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), machine manufacturers, system integrators, and technology providers. Initially, some of OMAC's goals were to reduce delivery times, maximize the use of available resources, improve profitability across the industry, and allow each organization to maintain a competitive edge.
OMAC's core initiatives include PackML (also known as ISA-TR88), a technology standard focused on industrial automation. PackML was initially released in the United States in 2002 to simplify the integration of different machines and standardize hardware-to-software communication by keeping machine modes, states, and tag naming conventions consistent.
Using the latest version of ISA-TR88.00.02, OMAC is helping to advance the standardized communication protocols needed to support IIoT by developing accompanying specifications for OPCUA.
The end of the single-supplier ecosystem?
Will this end the habit of customers buying all products within a single supplier ecosystem?
While large companies can establish their own protocols, this doesn't necessarily serve the end customer well. Problems arise when machine manufacturers or OEMs need something outside the system because the standards aren't open. Few companies can provide everything.
In the era of IIoT, when it comes to motion control systems and services, leading machine manufacturers, OEMs, and producers are seeking hardware and software capable of executing and efficiently delivering comprehensive data to power remote and predictive maintenance, downtime and condition monitoring, performance visualization, and digital asset management.
Through open industry standards and protocols, complete cloud connectivity and a complete communication network can be achieved, thereby unlocking next-generation technologies and maintaining the integrity of proprietary components.
In the near future, OEMs are expected to need to spend 50% to 60% of their machine development time focusing on software requirements. This will be a significant change, especially for smaller, traditional machine manufacturers. Using standardized software and unified open protocols can help them meet these challenges and accelerate their time to market.
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