In modern production, the demands on the exchange of data and therefore on real-time capability are increasing. Will open protocol standards such as OPC UA soon be established everywhere?

First of all: OPC UA is not a protocol in the conventional sense. It is a framework for industrial interoperability for exchanging information - not just data, but also its description and meaning - with access rights and integrated security. OPC UA uses various underlying protocols for the actual transport, such as TCP, UDP, MQTT or AMQP, and can also be expanded in the future.

OPC UA has become a kind of "movement" that is hard to ignore. The huge investment alone can be seen in the 50 or so industrial groups currently working on Companion specifications: The VDMA is currently active in the factory automation sector with 15 groups. But also the AIM-D association for AutoID devices - and many others. Competitors come together to standardize the information and interfaces of their devices and machines. The aim is always to plug and play standardized information, which is then exchanged using OPC UA mechanisms - from the sensor to the cloud. An OPC UA-capable device can be connected to Microsoft Azure or SAP ERP in ten minutes. Previously, expensive integrators had to be commissioned for this. These standardization successes are inspiring other new groups. The short answer: Yes, I believe that OPC UA has the potential to establish itself wherever industrial, robust communication is required.

Last year, the OPC Foundation announced that it would extend the standardization for OPC UA to TSN-capable Ethernet networks right down to the field level. This should help the acceptance of OPC UA. How is the industry reacting to this?

The acceptance of OPC UA and the membership figures of the OPC Foundation are essentially growing due to the integrated security in the horizontal and vertical area right up to the IT level. The announcement of the Field-Level Communication (FLC) initiative is also not limited to TSN. The Foundation did not start with the aim of defining a new fieldbus, but rather to integrate existing approaches into OPC UA. The most important aspect is to have the information models available end-to-end from the sensor to the cloud with integrated security.

The FLC working group aims to solve all automation requirements (factory and process) for communication with field devices. TSN is just one variant as a deterministic transmission channel alongside conventional Ethernet and, in future, 5G. Standardization will take several years and, as always, the market will ultimately decide with criteria such as costs, consistency, performance, manageability of complexity, diagnostic options and, of course, availability.