Yokogawa hosted the third annual OPC Day Europe in their European headquarters in Amersfoort, the Netherlands. Yokogawa provided great facilities for the event that gathered up 150 OPC enthusiasts from all over the Europe. 

Yokogawa’s European Headquarters

As usual, the speakers presented what’s new in OPC UA and what kind of new development has happened during the past years. Frank Hurink from Yokogawa had an interesting presentation about benefits of OPC UA for their large scale SCADA. Yokogawa has a long history with OPC and they have had an active role in OPC UA development. Currently they provide an OPC UA server in their Centum VP Process Control System and an OPC UA client in their FAST/TOOLS SCADA.

The first benefit of OPC UA for Yokogawa’s control systems is improved security, which is a major topic for their customers. The standard security model of OPC UA with its certificates embedded in the protocol provides high security in the communication network. Secondly, OPC UA enables platform independent communication which is required in Yokogawa’s platform independent SCADA. It can support OPC UA from all the platforms that the SCADA supports, even the future platforms. Platform independence improves return on investment because solutions can be moved cross platform. Thirdly, OPC UA is easier to configure to work over Internet and firewalls. Large SCADA systems are typically connecting various locations, and OPC UA makes long distance implementations more straight-forward. The fourth benefit of OPC UA for Yokogawa is that it provides a single solution from embedded to enterprise level, which reduces costs and improves availability. 24/7 availability is a key issue an a major requirement for Yokogawa’s Oil & Gas customers, and OPC UA’s redundancy is the fifth benefit for Yokogawa. Lastly, the information of OPC UA helps structuring and organizing the multi-million data points of large supervisory systems.

Whereas this OPC Day was organized for the third time, we have had OPC Days in Finland for much longer time. Next October the tenth annual OPC Day Finland will be organized together with MES people in the city of Tampere, a couple of hours drive from Helsinki. After the OPC Day Prosys will organize OPC UA Workshop which is a great opportunity to get started with OPC UA client and server development. You can read about last year’s OPC Day and OPC UA Workshop here. More information about this year’s events will be published in the near future. If you are interested in OPC & MES Day or OPC UA Workshop, please contact me and I will keep you updated.