Industry collaborate to address real time device applications

The solution will be based on the OPC UA protocol, which allows easy and secure sharing of information across different vendor technologies, and the Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) suite of standards, which helps improve latency and robustness in converged industrial networks.

“Connecting technologies across an industrial organisation while maintaining multivendor interoperability requires a harmonised, interoperable solution that uses consistent information models, communication and application behaviour (together known as application profiles),” said Paul Brooks, Business Development Manager, Rockwell Automation.

“That’s what this group of automation leaders are combining their expertise to create. Our solution will give manufacturing and industrial organisations best-of-breed I/O device control, motion and safety application profiles,” said Sebastian Sachse, B&R Industrial Automation.

To ensure the emerging OPC UA TSN solution supports interoperability of different vendor technologies on the same network, the companies are engaging with industry consortia such as Avnu, IEEE, IIC, LNI 4.0 and OPC Foundation.

The companies are also planning an announcement in the coming months on how to achieve unified application profiles, which is the last hurdle to device harmonisation. They aim to provide one-stop-shop certification of the overall solution up to the device-profile level.

The companies have already published whitepapers on OPC UA TSN technology, such as an IIC whitepaper on converged traffic types. They have also made significant contributions to the recently released PubSub extension of OPC UA, and plan to set up a collaboration between the IIC and LNI testbeds.