FDT Group and OPC Foundation hosted a joint webinar on September 14th, focused on educating industrial automation end-users and manufacturers about efforts to empower a single enterprise integration platform for secure and managed exchange of performance driven-analytics. This is a key topic with the growth of the IIoT and Industrie 4.0.

The webinar highlighted the latest collaborative developments and the role the FDT for OPC UA information model companion specification plays in evolving digital architecture transformation for the new era of automation. Supporting brownfield and greenfield applications, the unified solution empowers the next generation industrial workforce with open, flexible deployment options allowing sensor to cloud, enterprise-wide connectivity.

The webinar explored:

  • Development work resulting in a device-to-cloud computing strategy that supports configuration, communication, run-time and historical data access, as well as alarming and event services for existing and upcoming devices supported through FDT technology.
  • Introduction of an FDT IIoT Server (FITS™) combining OPC UA integration, web services and rich control network interoperability to optimize connectivity and information exchange, and simplifying the move to IIoT.
  • Advancement of FDT’s approach to providing access to meaningful, real-time plant information and asset health data with NAMUR NE107 diagnostics with Device Type Managers (DTMs) available throughout the plant topology via a robust network tunneling capability.
  • Adoption of FDT for device integration and OPC UA for the communication layer, respectively, of the German Reference Architecture Model Industrie 4.0 (RAMI 4.0).
  • Discovery of application use case scenarios and technology demonstration utilizing FDT for OPC UA and Industrie 4.0 through the RAMI Asset Administration Shell.

Enjoy the webinar recording!