March 2019

53 www.drivesncontrols.com March 2019 EXECUTIVE VIEWPOINT n The reasons for, and requirements of, OPC UA over TSN derive from the expectations of users – specifically for designing efficient and effective production processes – while at the same time reducing the costs for commissioning and maintenance, as well as the cost-effective mass-production of individualised products. This requires a change from conventional production lines to flexible production systems, and insight into production processes without disrupting machine operation. Further aspects are the growing number of network participants, the increasing data volume, and the vision to develop a technology that will be able to cope with the extreme time demands of the coming decades. Therefore, OPC UA over TSN is being standardised at all levels to ensure that it can meet the requirements of future applications. An important indicator for the performance of the technology – especially in motion control applications – is the shortest achievable cycle time. It quantifies the time required by a controller to send all outgoing data packets to all corresponding network nodes and, in return, to receive all incoming data packets from the nodes. It is important that all network nodes receive the outgoing data packets from the controller within the same cycle. Achieving the shortest cycle times is a significant challenge. If the technology meets this requirement, it can also be used in environments with lower timing requirements. A White Paper, OPC UA TSN - A new Solution for Industrial Communication , compares the cycle times of different industrial Ethernet systems with OPC UA over TSN. Network participants with OPC UA over TSN can communicate up to 18 times faster than with any protocol available on the market today. This opens up new possibilities in the field of highly synchronous drive applications and control tasks. In addition, the technology allows the simultaneous control of more than 10,000 nodes in a network and benefits from bandwidth extensions of the Ethernet standard, so that even large amounts of data can be handled easily. This is advantageous, for example, for big data analyses or integrated vision applications. In the future, OPC UA over TSN will enable plug-and-produce networks that are easy to administer and configure. With the OPC UA information model, devices can be recognised and integrated. By standardising application profiles for I/O, motion and safety, users can access the largest ecosystem of components. Integration and administration costs and effort are significantly reduced by OPC UA specifications due to the manufacturer-independent description of machine processes. This will save users time and resources during commissioning and subsequent production. n I see those same engineers working with outdated or incomplete information on the components they’re specifying, which leads to all sorts of problems in the purchasing, manufacturing and commissioning stages of a project. It’s difficult to understand why this is, when, for example, a comprehensive and regularly updated database of more than 860,000 products for electrical and automation applications is available on line – and it’s free to access and use. Shocking When it comes to change processes, some of the things I see are truly shocking. Many companies still deliver manufacturing drawings to their shop floor on paper. If something needs modifying or changing as the job progresses – and it’s almost inevitable it will – out come the highlighters and the marker pens so that the changes can be marked up on the drawings. But are these changes ever reported accurately to the design department? The most optimistic answer I can give is “sometimes”, but it would probably be more honest to say, “not often”. The result is that the job goes out with inaccurate documentation, so it’s hard to maintain and almost impossible to fault-find for the rest of its service life. These are problems that will come back to bite you – I see many cases of companies losing the goodwill of their customers because of poor documentation. Surely a better way has to be to cut out the paper and send the drawings to the shop floor electronically? Give the production team tablets – the electronic sort, that is, not the ones you get from the chemist – so that they can not only access the latest drawings but interact with them. If they need to make changes, they can enter them on the tablet and they’re instantly visible to the design engineers. No more lost information or inaccurate documentation, but a lot more happy end-users! As a bonus, eliminating paper drawings also benefits the environment. Tip of the iceberg In reality, when it comes to the ways in which a CAE package developed specifically for the electrical sector can boost efficiency and profitability, the points I’ve mentioned are just the tip of the iceberg. Yes, a good CAE package costs money, but from personal experience I can tell you the companies that embrace change and make this investment grow and prosper. By contrast, those that stick to inefficient 20th century design and manufacturing processes struggle to maintain even a toehold in today’s hugely competitive marketplace. n