After focusing on edge-cloud communication using OPC UA over MQTT, the OPC Foundation is continuing its activities with a REST initiative. The aim is to be able to offer a harmonized solution for the automation world that scales from the field to the cloud and makes it easy to access the standardized information models of the OT world for applications such as DataSpaces and Metaverse and initiatives such as the asset administration shell.

Stefan Hoppe, President of the OPC Foundation, says: "The OPC UA specification includes transport patterns such as client/server or pub/sub, for connection to various transport protocols such as TCP, UDP, MQTT, which were designed for OT environments. However, the IT world would like to use the standardized data from the OT area in order to use it in concepts such as Asset Administration Shell, Data Spaces, Digital Twins and Metaverses. All of these initiatives and solutions involve the exchange of information between several companies with different use cases such as product lifecycle data (AAS) or governance data (DataSpaces). In most cases, the applications exchange data via proprietary or standardized HTTP REST interfaces. The new OPC UA REST working group will further formalize the existing interface and implement additional use cases for the integration of OPC UA information via REST interfaces.

"Our aim is to make the information standardized in the OT world from the more than 90 Companion specifications available to the IT world as easily as possible. It would be completely crazy for the IT world to use its own tools to write new information models where domain experts have already agreed on standardized models. More than 14 years of work by industry experts and a lot of taxpayers' money would be wasted," warns Hoppe and calls on OT and IT to coordinate better with each other.

In keeping with this, the OPC Foundation has agreed a memorandum of understanding with the German Bitkom for a close exchange of information at the trade fair. Previously, in February, a cooperation had already been sealed with the American Digital Twin Consortium (DTC), which is also bearing its first fruits: "The OPC Foundation maintains the global standard for secure industrial interoperability for information modeling and data exchange, which benefits everyone who wants to create semantically identical digital twins as part of the cooperation with DTC. DTC's digital twins will be fully compatible with the OPC UA framework used in the runtime components in the operational area. Users will have the benefit of being able to quickly and accurately model any aspect of data and interact with any digital twin."

OPC UA goes Metaverse

Back in October last year, the OPC Foundation and its board companies launched another IT initiative, the Metaverse Group, to further promote the use of OPC UA in industrial metaverse applications. At the trade fair, the Foundation will be demonstrating an industrial metaverse as an open source project using the example of a wind farm application. This is based on an open source reference architecture of the Digital Twin Consortium's manufacturing ontology and a virtual 3D created with Unity. OPC UA with its modeling capabilities and secure connectivity acts as a digital twin - the virtual turbines are coupled with the physical reality via OPC UA over MQTT.