Smart Manufacturing Connectivity for Brown-field Sensors Testbed
IEC 62451-5. To be more precise, this
standardization activity, which is jointly
carried out by the IO-Link Community and
the OPC Foundation and which is led by TE,
uses the derivative IEC 62541-100 for device
integration as the base class for the IO-
Link/OPC UA Companion Standard. The final
draft of this new standard is currently under
review and the team hopes to publish it
before the SPS IPC Drives 2018 event being
held in November in Nuremburg. The
Testbed
provides
input
to
this
standardization activity, and delivers a
reference implementation for the future
OPC UA for IO-Link Companion Standard.
however most of them are maintained by
companies that form neighbors in the value
creation chain. At the IIC, Testbed members
have the opportunity to form relationships
with other companies (e.g., the customers of
TE’s customers) that could provide value via
the deployment of testbed technologies.
Within the Testbed Project
Within the Greater IIC Ecosystem The Testbed got its start with TE’s hardware
project on the Y-Gateway where its base
features had to be available prior to the
implementation of the Testbed. So, the
actual cooperation project started two or
three quarters after the Testbed’s approval.
This setup was challenging because project
teams need to be nurtured during the
project phase and it is important for every
team member to be involved from the very
beginning. That is why the Testbed team
recommends using available hardware for a
testbed and focusing on the interoperability
and security aspects rather than on the
development of hardware components.
From a technical point of view, there was
one provider for every component along the
Three-Tier architecture so the roles were
well-defined. Every company executed its
role well and virtually everything proceeded
as planned. Naturally, there were minor
challenges along the way.
The Testbed team received a lot of feedback
from other IIC members. As a result, many
contacts were established and individual
Testbed team members/partners were
increasingly recognized over the course of
many presentations for the IIC. The Testbed
has been a valuable experience for everyone
involved. The Testbed participants are also
engaged in many user groups and consortia, The special resources that were needed both
inside and outside the Testbed perimeter
were the contributing experts in IO-Link and
OPC UA. Their intense cooperation under
the Testbed’s umbrella definitely led to
some increase in competencies of the
respective participant companies during the
project and to a further extension of their
knowledge bases.
The IO-Link Device Description (IODD)
defines the IO-Link semantics which is
converted by the Testbed to an OPC UA
information model. IEC 61131-9 is a
reference to the fundamental standard for
IO-Link, which does not include the IODD
specification. The Testbed may be
influencing the IODD specification to some
extent because the team also discovered
inconsistencies between the IODD from
different vendors, which actually made the
conversion fail.
T HE E XPERIENCE
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IIC Journal of Innovation