Posted to News on 9th May 2016, 14:58
OPC Foundation and CiA sign Memorandum of Understanding
The OPC Foundation is a nonprofit international standards organisation dedicated to providing the best specifications, technology, certification and process to achieve multivendor, multiplatform, secure reliable interoperability for moving data and information from the embedded world to the enterprise, inclusive of big data and cloud functionality. The OPC Foundation has developed the OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA) as the infrastructure for the Internet of Things and is domain independent.
The CAN in Automation (CiA) international users' and manufacturers' group established in 1992 develops the internationally standardised CANopen technology. This includes the CANopen and CANopen FD application layer and communication profile specifications as well as the CiA standardised CANopen device, application, and interface profiles. CiA also specifies application programming interfaces (API) as well as middleware-mappings to CANopen.
Now, the OPC Foundation and CAN in Automation have agreed to collaborate in the development of specifications, white papers, guidelines and processes that provide the infrastructure necessary for the two organisations to promote system wide interoperability. Deliverables from the collaboration between the two organisations will benefit the members of both in the pursuit of developing and achieving information integration across a multitude of domains.
At the Hannover Fair, Thomas J. Burke, President and Executive Director of the OPC Foundation and Holger Zeltwanger, CiA Managing Director, signed a Memorandum of Understanding in which both organisations agree to closely cooperate in the development and marketing of shared deliverables to foster interoperability.
Thomas J Burke says: "The OPC Foundation collaboration with CAN in Automation provides the infrastructure necessary to achieve information modelling of data from CAN technology enabled devices and networks and be able to leverage the power of OPC UA providing generic information integration and seamless communication between devices and applications from the embedded world to the cloud. CAN networks are used in many different application fields, inclusive of vehicles, industrial automation, building automation, healthcare and oil / gas. This closely aligns with the vision of OPC Foundation in the pursuit of domain independence and seamless interoperability across domains".
Holger Zeltwanger says: "The intended mapping of OPC UA services to CANopen brings embedded and deeply embedded real-time networks to the factory-level communication systems. OPC UA servers can be implemented on CANopen host controllers, gateways, or other sophisticated CANopen devices."
For more information please visit www.can-cia.org.
