B&R claims to have become the first company in the world to develop a field device for Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture (OPC UA).
The company says it has added the vendor-independent communication protocol to their X20 I/O system.
B&R says the new X20 I/O system bus controller makes it possible to implement OPC UA communication from the sensor layer to the enterprise resource planning (ERP) layer “without any interfaces whatsoever”.
The X20BC008U bus controller functions as an OPC UA server and provides all information about connected I/O modules to OPC UA clients from any manufacturer. This includes, for example, controllers, supervisory control and data acquisition (Scada) systems, ERP systems or cloud applications.
Interfaces, gateways and the associated loss of information are a thing of the past. All production process data is transferred using a single protocol.
With the new publish-subscribe model (pub/sub), data can be distributed in a very efficient manner, says B&R, which claims the X20BC008U bus controller can be used with all controllers and I/O modules from the X20 and X67 product lines without limitations.
