The concrete reference to practice will be presented at this year's SPS in Nuremberg: At the OPC Foundation booth, the four project partners ASENTICS, PEER Group, Robert Bosch Manufacturing Solutions and VITRONIC will demonstrate the simultaneous interaction of several clients with image processing systems from different suppliers using a hardware demonstrator. In addition to switching between clients, different use case scenarios can also be selected. The demonstrator establishes an infrastructure layer that enables a simplified and uniform integration of different image processing systems into higher-level IT production systems (PLC, SCADA, MES, ERP, Cloud, ...). Furthermore, it demonstrates the manufacturer-independent control of a vision system using the abstraction of the system behavior defined in the OPC UA specification.
"We are very pleased to have reached another milestone in the realization of Industry 4.0 with this project", says Carsten Born, Development Machine Vision Platform, VITRONIC. "Through standardization, we not only facilitate data exchange and networking at the automation level - we also reduce the integration effort for components and systems and thus enable a more flexible use of vision systems.
The OPC Machine Vision Companion Specification is the result of the collaboration of an international group of experts. With the development of the hardware demonstrator, we have shown how seamless vertical communication between the different levels of the automation pyramid can be. This marks the beginning of the era of a truly 'connected factory