Progea at the OPC UA Workshop in Scottsdale, Arizona

Progea was the only Italian company participating at the first OPC UA workshop held in Scotsdale, Arizona (USA) from 16th to 18th June. During these 3 days many software developers, from major international software companies, put their heads together, intensely exchanging experiences in order to reach the objective of this meeting to consolidate the new OPC UA technology (unified Architecture) as the communication platform of the future. Great efforts have been made to get this
functionality up and working and what seems a never ending road has almost reached its destination in becoming a reality. Progea´s part in this project is to release a product based on this new technology within the next 12 months, adopting the new Object Model to allow the currently available and different specifications (DA, A&E, HDA etc.) to unite in one single product.
The advantages that the OPC UA will offer are:
1) Unification of the various and current specifications (a multiple cross-platform architecture based on past implementation experiences with different specifications developed over the years)
2) No longer binding to DCOM. This new independence brings many benefits in more ways than one. This specification is portable to different Development Environments - Operating Systems with the great possibility to have Firewall Friendliness and enhanced `real´ security flexibility.
3) This specification can be implemented directly in PLC-devices device-PLCs, abolishing custom protocols and the need to have a pc as an opc server.
4) Performances will not be affected by adopting these optimized techniques in the above mentioned implementation (currently the Binary Encoding and Web Service Transport protocols are used for this purpose)
The Progea R&S technicians would strongly like to point out the importance of adopting this new specification and technologies, being at the evolutional forefront of important future communication techniques.