The age of Industry 4.0 is here! Easily set up a control system that can connect to any device using the OPC UA protocol with Wolfram SystemModeler.

Industry 4.0, the fourth industrial revolution of cyber-physical systems, is on the way! With it come sensors and boards that are much cheaper than they used to be. All of these components are connected through some kind of network or cloud so that they are able to talk to each other. This is where the OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA) comes in. OPC UA is a machine-to-machine communication protocol for industrial automation. It is designed to be the successor to the older OPC Classic protocol that is bound to the Microsoft-only process exchange COM/DCOM (if you are interested in the OPCClassic library for Wolfram SystemModeler, you can find it here).

Having a standard for communication in the upcoming Industry 4.0 is important for every new connected device. With a carefully considered protocol, all of the following aspects can be included in a smart way:

• Platform independence
• Security
• Extensibility
• Information modeling

More information can be found on the OPC Foundation website. As you can see, a lot of focus is on the secure communication between all devices in the OPC UA network. Some of the companies that are extensively using OPC UA include Siemens, SAP, Honeywell and Yokogawa. Read the rest of this blog post here.