The Object Management Group (OMG), an international, open membership technology standards consortium, and the OPC Foundation, an organization with a mission to help industry vendors, end-users and software developers maintain interoperability in their manufacturing and automation assets, announced a collaborative strategy for market and technical interoperability for the two leading standards for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT).
The OMG and OPC Foundation have developed a technical positioning and document for usage of both the OMG Data Distribution Service (DDS) standard and the OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA) standard.
The positioning document explains that the DDS and OPC UA standards are largely complementary and compatible. Both are important to the future of the IIoT, the organizations say. The document is a joint recommendation; it’s designed to help companies quickly implement an IIoT strategy.
OPC UA is an industrial communication architecture for platform independent, high performance, secure interoperability between sensors, field devices, controllers and applications at the shop-floor level in real-time as well as between the shop floor and the enterprise IT cloud.
DDS provides interoperable, secure, platform independent, real-time data sharing across any kind of network. DDS lets applications define and share user data with controlled “Quality of Service” (QoS) such as performance, scalability, reliability, durability and security.
“The OPC UA and OMG DDS standards complement each other and are both important to the success of the Industrial Internet of Things,” said Richard Soley, chairman and CEO of OMG and executive director of the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC). “One of the critical standards requirements coming out of the IIC testbed program is the need to link between standards. Today’s announcement is a milestone in bridging complementary standards.”
