OPC Connectivity All the Way – Making the most of it

What’s common between ExxonMobil, Shell, Ford, General Electric, Dell, Pfizer, and 45% other Fortune 500 companies? Other than the fact that they are all highly successful businesses, they all rely on OPC to help them stay increasingly profitable.

In a world driven by reduced prices and decreasing margins increasing efficiencies in process and manufacturing is survival, interoperability and integration of information systems is vital. The need for interoperability and integration of systems can vary as business dynamics vary. A reduction in inventories requires increased response times. For better planning and decision making, access to accurate and current information is needed. Those looking for improved consistency and quality, require more automated business processes. Those facing increased customer service and compliance reporting demands require access to additional information. All roads lead to improved interoperability, and OPC connectivity is paving the way, all the way!

Interoperability can be defined as “the ability of applications and systems to communicate and exchange services with each other based on standards and to cooperate in processes using the information and services”. To put it more simply: Everyone accesses information, gets data, shares data, understands data and uses the information in a standard way.

OPC has grown in stature over the last decade. From Microsoft’s COM/DCOM technology based standards, to the recent platform independent OPC UA (Unified Architecture). OPC UA extends the domain of interoperability from plant floor to enterprise level applications, and is going to be the architecture of choice in the near future.

OPC Enables Integration
Regardless of what business a company is in, market dynamics are demanding faster response times and more efficient decision making. Customers need more data, faster, derived from multiple sources and delivered simultaneously to many destinations. In order to achieve the benefits of flexible, scalable and interoperable systems, without high integration costs and time, the solution must also be standardized across multiple vendors, systems and products. That is the challenge OPC successfully addresses.

In a nutshell, OPC provides a functional interface for reading and writing data in an efficient and deterministic way. There are separate specifications to address different data semantics, including real-time data, historical data, alarm and event information and batch data. The interfaces are comprehensive enough to provide the functionality that users require, yet simple and practical to implement, which results in wide vendor acceptance. The OPC specifications are implemented on Microsoft’s distributed binary communication protocol, DCOM. This offers several advantages, including high speed data transfer capability, efficient handling of multiple client/server connections and built-in operating system level security. In addition, many of the major control systems, machine interfaces, historians, expert systems and other automation applications are widely deployed on the Microsoft Windows platforms. Proper adherence to the OPC standards is aided by the OPC Foundation Compliance Testing tools and product interoperability sessions. These factors have led to the creation of fast, flexible and reliable connectivity solutions that businesses require.

OPC UA Drives Interoperability
Since OPC offers so much in the way of connectivity, it begs the question ‘Why introduce OPC UA?’ The primary purpose of the classic OPC was to solve the integration problem between devices and PC based client applications. The automation industry’s desire for connectivity standardization has led to OPC being used in a wider range of applications than was originally considered. The scope now extends to enterprise level interoperability, which includes applications from the field level all the way to realm of Enterprise Report Planning software, across multiple hardware platforms, and in globally diverse installations. As technology and market requirements change, so must the interoperability standards, therefore OPC UA extends the scope of the classic OPC specifications. The single OPC UA architecture encompasses and unifies the functional data format for real-time, historical, event based and batch information. The OPC UA specifications also go farther in setting standards for application security, reliability, audit tracking and information management. These are key components in an interoperable enterprise architecture.

The OPC UA specifications are implemented on a service base architecture, which leverages existing standards such as XML, SOAP and the WS initiatives. Services based implementations are supported by Microsoft as well as many other operating systems. This means OPC UA will be available on more platforms, including embedded operating systems. This promotes the power of standard based connectivity across more layers of the enterprise. A service based model also allows OPC UA to leverage standard security aspects such as authentication, encryption, data integrity and auditing. These are important features for companies facing increased security requirements.

In addition to extending, unifying and allowing backwards compatibility with existing OPC products, OPC UA offers a rich information model to better transform the data into information. Not only does OPC UA allow access to multiple data sources and formats, the architecture also supports reference semantics so client applications can discover and understand the information they are collecting. These capabilities offer the promise of more powerful OPC UA client applications in the future. The same flexible, secure interfaces could be available on a smart transmitter, the control system operator station, the historian, maintenance database and the manufacturing execution system; A single interoperable data highway from the shop floor to the top floor.

ICI use OPC connectivity to drive competitive advantage
As the world becomes more and more comfortable with OPC, benefits of sharing and compiling data across the plant floor become more and more evident. Investments in centralized data repositories are now making more sense than ever before. At the Polyester Fire Plant of ICI new Lahore, Pakistan, the management took similar steps. Increased pressure on production to enhance manufacturing efficiencies required them to know where the inefficiencies actually were located.

Using OPC connectivity, data from Siemens, Foxboro, Rockwell systems was all integrated in literally plug and play manner into a real time data management system powered by SENSYS’ IntelliMAX Plant v3.0.

The management was now able to historize plant wide data, run reports to identify process bottle necks, and then take steps to remove those bottle necks.

As time went by, exponential increase in the productivity of the plant was observed. 3 months after the SENSYS Solutions team had helped deploy the Real Time Data Management System an over all increase of 10% in productivity was observed.