Dates and Events: |
OSADL Articles:
2023-11-12 12:00
Open Source License Obligations Checklists even better now
Import the checklists to other tools, create context diffs and merged lists
2022-07-11 12:00
Call for participation in phase #4 of Open Source OPC UA open62541 support project
Letter of Intent fulfills wish list from recent survey
2022-01-13 12:00
Phase #3 of OSADL project on OPC UA PubSub over TSN successfully completed
Another important milestone on the way to interoperable Open Source real-time Ethernet has been reached
2021-02-09 12:00
Open Source OPC UA PubSub over TSN project phase #3 launched
Letter of Intent with call for participation is now available |
OSADL talks at ESE Embedded Software Engineering Kongress
COOL - Compact OSADL Online Lectures - December 2024 edition
The OSADL OPC UA PubSub over TSN Project
Project phase #1 - Project phase #2 - Project phase #3 - Project phase #4 - Project phase #5 - Presentations - Project overview
Rationale
State of the art
The Ethernet standard and the future evolution of this base communication layer represents today an important standard of interoperable network communication - in fact from sensor via control system up to the server. According to common understanding, this will remain so without doubt in the near and even less near future. To the contrary, there are many doubts that the upper communication layers will remain as they are now, since the desired deterministic and interoperable connectivity of the future requires that only a single protocol be used - instead of the more than 40 different ones none of which has reached more than 50 percent market share. In addition, communication methods are needed that require much less resources than today which is an important prerequisite to serve the expected large number of future nodes.
Next generation OPC UA
In order to obtain the mentioned interoperable connectivity, it was proposed some time ago to equip the already existing OPC UA protocol with additional features needed by industry and establish it as a unified communication protocol of the future. OPC UA runs even on systems that provide only a minimum of resources with respect to network bandwidth and computing power. Deterministic communication via this protocol shall be obtained using Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) that currently undergoes standardization. Two important protocol additions needed by industry that also are about to be standardized are Publish ("Pub") and Subscribe ("Sub"). While the former is needed to simultaneously send messages to a number of receivers, the latter allows a program component to register for a particular event such as sensor data exceeding or falling below permissible limits to avoid polling.
Project phases
- Phase #5 (Call for participation)
- open62541: Full XML datatype de-/encoding
- open62541: Implementation of a Binary / ROM-based nodestore
- Creating up-to-date and easy-to-use PubSub over TSN examples and building a demonstrator that shows PubSub over TSN communication in a heterogeneous environment (with different CPU architectures)
- open62541: Enhancement and improvement of the PubSub FastPath
- open62541: UA-Nodeset based data type processing for the Nodeset-Compiler
- Phase #4 (completed)
- Load and store information data model at run time through configuration file (not statically compiled in firmware)
- Implement “reverse connect feature” as described in "OPC 10000-7 - Part 7: Profiles", chapters 6.6.5 Reverse Connect Server Facet and 6.6.75 Reverse Connect Client Facet
- Complement the ongoing project to update the OPC client/server release to version 1.05 without overlapping with the parts already commissioned
- Implement support of PubSub state machine according to OPC10000-14, chapter 6.2.1
- Companion specification selection in the build system for fast integration
- Server configuration with a JSON file
- Further CPU and memory optimizations for resource constrained devices (identify, document and implement optimizations for memory and CPU footprint)
- Phase #3 (completed)
- Security support for the UADP protocol
- Providing certification prerequisites according to the “Full Embedded Profile” by OPC Foundation
- Phase #2 (completed)
- Successful certification of an example server according to the “Micro Embedded Device Server” profile by OPC Foundation
- PubSub implementation as stand-alone server
- Phase #1 (completed)
- Brokerless OPC UA Pub/Sub via IP multicast and the binary message encoding format according to draft of part 14 of the OPC UA specification
- Integration of the publisher in a regular OPC UA server with additional real-time interrupting
- Implementation of the subscribers as standalone software
Presentations
In-depth presentations along with a video clip are available here.
