Italy’s National Association of Electrotechnical and Electronic Companies (ANIE) Automazione and OPC Foundation have begun a comprehensive collaboration program, focusing on the technology transfer and further adoption of OPC UA in the Italian market.
ANIE Automazione and OPC Foundation have agreed to:
• realizing interoperability demonstrations on the field-level and field-to-cloud paradigms
• an extensive training program for ANIE members, to bring them up to date on the latest developments on OPC UA and make them proficient on latest OPC Foundation demonstrations
• allowing ANIE member companies to join OPC Foundation field-to-cloud demo, so that data from their devices will be visible in the cloud dashboard from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft
• provide Italian translations of marketing material like the OPC UA brochure to make it even simpler for Italian automation companies to fully understand the present value and the future potential of the underlying technologies
• organize joint conferences.
The collaboration between the two associations was visible at a joint booth at SPS 2023 in May in Parma, Italy. The booth presented the main OPC UA technologies and was jointly managed by OPC Foundation experts and ANIE Booth activities included:
• Demo 1: Field-level communication with OPC UA Field eXchange (UAFX)—controller-to-controller, controller-to-device, safety, instrumentation, motion
• Demo 2: Cloud connectivity with OPC UA over message queuing telemetry transport (MQTT) or via representational state transfer (REST)—secure and scalable field-to-cloud connectivity with or without IoT gateways/agents
• “Beyond controller-to-controller: OPC UA paves the way to the cloud” presentation
• Italian translation of OPC UA brochure.
“Italy is the second biggest automation market in Europe; Italian machine builders are world leaders in many segments, and Italy’s manufacturer include the top global players in many industries, from automotive manufacturing to fashion and luxury goods, food and beverage and pharmaceuticals. Therefore, the importance of Italy for the OPC Foundation is very clear” said Stefan Hoppe, president and executive director of the OPC Foundation. “With this collaboration, we aim to help Italian original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and manufacturing companies to understand and embrace the importance of OPC UA as the common language of automation, not just in the field, but all the way to the cloud. Moreover, we look forward to technical contributions to the Foundation of many leading Italian automation companies.”
The digitalization of the automation industry is both an opportunity and a challenge, noted Marco Svara, president of the Interconnection and Control area of ANIE Automazione and coordinator of the ANIE OPC UA working group. “OPC UA is establishing itself at the de-facto standard in this area,” he said. “If Italian automation companies don’t adopt the OPC UA standard, it’s just like our export managers not being able to speak English. Moreover, the OPC UA standard is evolving toward many sectors where Italy has the potential to express leadership: Italian companies cannot miss this opportunity. Therefore, ANIE has an important role in helping our manufacturers understand and invest in OPC UA.”
ANIE Automazione represents and supports companies operating in mechatronics and discrete automation; digitalization of processes and products; interconnection and control; and process automation. Federazione ANIE, with more than 1,400 member companies and about 500,000 employees, represents the most strategic and advanced sector among the Italian industrial sectors. The companies belonging to Federazione ANIE invest 5% of their turnover in research and development (R&D), representing more than 30% of the entire R&D investment made by the private sector in Italy.
The OPC Foundation has been promoting the development and adoption of the OPC information exchange standard since 1996. As an advocate and steward of these specifications, the OPC Foundation’s mission is to help vendors, end users and software developers achieve interoperability of their manufacturing and automation resources. The OPC Foundation’s mission is to provide the best specifications, technologies, processes and certification to ensure interoperability between different vendors and different platforms securely and reliably from embedded systems to the enterprise cloud. The Foundation supports more than 930 members from around the world in industrial automation, information technology (IT), Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), machine-to-machine (M2M), Industry 4.0, building automation, machine tools, pharmaceuticals, petrochemical and smart energy in achieving this goal.
