Schneider Electric endorses initiative to drive IIoT adoption

Schneider Electric has announced that it welcomes the OPC Foundation’s recognition of industry efforts to bring interoperable communications to field-level industrial operations, and is to take a seat on the board.

In the fast-changing industrial space, operations technology and information technology are becoming increasingly interconnected to enable more flexible and agile manufacturing and processing operations to meet evolving market requirements.

The recognition of the importance of standards-based communication between operational technologies and information technologies (OT and IT) across devices, machine to machine, process units and cloud infrastructure as the basis for industry to achieve the full benefits of automation is a vital step.

“The benefits OT and IT connectivity can only be realised through open, deep interoperability. This drives an urgent need to move away from proprietary communication protocols in favour of open, unified, standards-based IIoT communications between sensors, actuators, controllers and cloud platforms,” said Neil Smith, Vice President, Industry Hub Pacific at Schneider Electric.

Schneider Electric has been working to bring open interoperable communications between devices and systems with a number of partners, and supports the OPC Foundation as the organisation sharpens its focus to deliver interoperability, flexibility and security between vendors’ automation and control systems at all levels.

OPC UA TSN (Open Platform Communication Unified Architecture Time Sensitive Network) is a flexible architecture offering new levels of performance and certified interoperability which will enhance interoperable, standard communication down to the field level.

As the layer that unifies the way data is exposed and exchanged, OPC UA is one of the major achievements of the OPC Foundation community. OPC UA along with TSN is a foundational platform for fully secure systems, delivering a new single set of end-to-end, natively secure communication profiles for industrial control, safety and motion built on real-time Ethernet to drive automation in factory, plant and process environments.

Image credit: ©stock.adobe.com/au/agsandrew