OPC Unified Architecture

Yeah, yeah.

OPCDA is the older than OPC UA.

OPCDA is kind of DCOM, DOS-centric communications, so serial level kind of communications.

And UA is unified architecture.

We have other customers that, for their integration, they have a polling agent on the inside of Typically, I'm like that layer three reaching out and just downloading.

So there's not a way for anything to come into the secure network.

It's as if they were pulling additional OPC UA telemetry as if it was another pipeline item.

And we've also got customers where we have a data diode in in there and they.

Yeah, a lot of the new greenfield projects that are happening right now, as we know, they're data centers, right? And these are brand new buildings that they're constructing from the ground up, and they're implementing a lot of the new technology, which I'm all for.

I'm all for implementing MQTT, OPC UA, smart sensors, digital twins.

I mean, this is all exciting new stuff, right? Who doesn't want to play with new toys? But the reality is this, that the factory down the street, It doesn't implement AI to that scale because they do not have the discipline or the procedures in order to then not only control and assess their current infrastructure and their current setup of the devices, but they don't have the a strategy in place that will get them ready for industry 4.0, right? So what do they end up doing? And I've seen this and it breaks my heart, right? It breaks my heart that they hire a new operations guy or they hire a new production manager and he calls a company like Red Zone.

And all they do is they bolt sensors on the side of these machines and then put a little screen up and say, here's how much bottles you ran today.

SQL's great for transactional data.

And With some of the software packages that are out there that do, I guess what you would call store and forward, where you got the PC running the software and it's got OPC UA or some native communications that goes out and talks to the tags or to the information, pulls the information based on event triggers or things like that, grabs the information and when it has the time, sends the transaction to the database.

We've got some machines out there that are doing 60 parts a minute where we're looking at everything like the recipe, the vial type, the vial size, the vial weight, the vial fill, the vision number of pixels that we determined in the fill, the cap torque, whether it rejected, whether it was accepted, the print OCR, all of that per vial, 60 parts per minute going into a SQL database.

Can be done, but if you're doing more time series data, where you need high speed streams of real time data, you could look at influx databases as well.

so glad you came to that now but i want you to go back to the beginning and try to understand like how much of the original uns problem that says may actually agree with back then not just to today and kind of were they competing visions were just two different communities solving different parts of a larger problem walk us back to the early stages of how we got to where we are

as in profiles what we did first and we spent six to 12 months, John, looking at what we could use for type definitions in our space and settled on OPC UA node sets, not because they're easy to read, but because they were comprehensive and had some level of adoption in our space.

So that might've been like the first place where we ticked Walker off because at the time he wasn't particularly enthusiastic.

Mine

And, uh, then NodeSet.

Actually, NodeSet is the OPC UA Part 5, uh, companion spec that is defining data models, and it tr- it serializes to a NodeSet, which is an XML-

Mm-hmm

... uh, document that we've written converters for-

Um, and to be quite honest, and I've told Arlen this, uh, I didn't think MQTT was like anything of note the first year I heard about it, 'cause it was like, "Here's MQTT, here's a protocol, Phillips 66, blah, blah, blah."

[laughs]

And I'm like, "Okay, we have OPC UA, who cares?" And then I think I talked to him or sent him an email or something-

Mm-hmm

So that's a real issue right now.

The good news is there are real standards for this, right? SIL two for instrument control, OPC UA with the LADS companion specification, and Allotrope, ADF, and ASM for analytical data, and fair principles as the philosophy underneath.

So none of this is theoretical anymore.

We just have to make sure that we are capturing the information we need so that we can train our models later.

So that's not really engineering.

That's just paying the same tax over and over again.

And what's changed is we have, you know, SIL2 and OPC UA and last companion specifications, and those are now real, um, and vendors are shipping against them, and buyers are writing them into their purs- purchase specifications.

So that's exciting.

So obviously EmptyKey Connect was in that for a while.

OPC UA is doing that stuff.

Sesame's been working in that space.

Everyone's doing something.

So, so Jonathan, the SM Profiles are obviously very important for the first imperative that John just talked about.

So tell me, how does it relate to OPC UA node sets? And, you know, what should manufacturers know about, you know, this interaction between SM Profiles and OPC UA node sets?

When we started formulating this theory, this c- the three imperatives which have deep analogy to software development, um, we looked for imperative number one, how are we gonna be able to share information models between constituents? And CESMII is ven- vendor agnostic.

We, we don't, um, uh, try and emphasize any one ecosystem.

Um, we looked at JSON Schema, which was, um, uh, pretty immature at the time.

We looked at what, uh, the different vendors offered for kind of their templating language.

And the, the only one that kind of met all the requirements of openness, reusability, no license costs, um, didn't have to pay a vendor to use, um, and was OOP complete, could, could express a complete object-oriented information model was OPC UA node sets.

Uh, arguably you coulda done it with SysML, but nobody could import those.