Rise in demand for Industrial IoT and Industry 4.0 is driving the need for open and secure connectivity between devices. As a result, the OPC Foundation’s Unified Architecture (OPC UA) is increasingly being considered as the standard. Against this background, OPC Foundation and VDMA India jointly organised symposium on OPC UA in Pune and Bangalore.

World over, the new concept, Industry 4.0, is fast gaining momentum. This new, disruptive technology based on digital innovations has recently found its curve of progression and has transformed and reshaped the way things are viewed in the manufacturing segment. The growth of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and Industry 4.0 is driving the need for open and secure connectivity between devices. This has resulted in the OPC Foundation’s Unified Architecture – OPC UA – increasingly being considered as the standard. Rather than replacing the standards, OPC UA complements them by creating a common layer for exchanging information.

Just plug & play
In Industry 4.0, the machine and plant builders will use the ‘Companion Specification’ element in order to enable an information exchange across manufacturers. A new machine can be integrated into a plant easily, since standardised information is available, which does not differ from manufacturer to manufacturer. The plug & work model is made possible by using standardised information models, so called Companion Specifications for OPC UA.

According to IBEF, the Government of India has set an ambitious target of increasing the contribution of manufacturing output to 25 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by 2025, from 16 percent currently. IoT, being one of the most important aspects of Industry 4.0 for India, is expected to capture close to 20 percent share in global IoT market in the next five years. According to IBEF forecast, the IoT market in India is projected to grow at a CAGR of more than 28 percent during 2015-2020.

Against this backdrop and to create more awareness, building strategies and roadmaps to migrate/build the business/ machines oriented towards Industry 4.0, which is the contemporary technology for the mechanical & plant engineering globally, for the Indian manufacturing industry, OPC Foundation and VDMA India jointly organised the first international symposium on “From Shop Floor to Top Floor: OPC UA – Platform enabler for Industrie 4.0” recently in Pune and Bangalore.
Notable speakers from Indian industry, academician, OPC Foundation, representative from VDMA Germany, members of VDMA implemented OPC UA, enlightened the audience on various facades of OPC UA – Digitization, Standardization, protocol, Certification, data security, implementation and case studies focusing manufacturing industries. Around 220 delegates comprising industry veterans, policy makers, academia, research institutions, media from both the cities participated at the symposium. In average, 90 per cent of the attendees found the event excellent.

Pune seminar

The event in Pune started with the traditional lamp lighting by the Chief Guest Tulika Pandey, Scientist ‘F’ & Director, Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology, Government of India accompanied by Stefan Hoppe, Global Vice President, OPC Foundation; Andreas Faath, Forum Industrie 4.0, VDMA Frankfurt, Germany; Jitendrakumar Kataria, Managing Director, Beckhoff Automation Private Limited and Smitha Rao, Co-Founder, Utthunga Technologies India.

In his welcome address Roy outlined on the digital disruption, Industry 4.0 and its significance to the manufacturing industry, Role of OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA) as an enabling technology for flexible, adaptive, and transparent production and how the VDMA members can support the Indian manufacturers in this journey through automation.

In her keynote presentation on “India’s stride into a Trillion Dollar Digital Economy”, Tulika Pandey enlightened the audience on the different initiatives taken the by the present Government for creating a digital ecosystem in the country and way forward.

The inaugural session ended with the presentation on “Automation pyramid gets reshaped”- Semantic Interoperability is the key of IIoT and Industrie 4.0” by Stefan Hoppe who gave an technical introduction on OPC UA and, Industrie 4.0 and key of information modelling, impact from IT and the future.

Post tea break, the first technical session started with the presentation from Smitha Rao, Co-Founder, Utthunga Technologies India on “OPC UA: Technical introduction”. She covered in details of the various facade of OPC UA – base concepts, transport, securities, scalability and utilities.
Andreas Faath, the last speaker of this session, spoke at length on “VDMA supports interoperability: OPC UA Companion Specifications as the key to success”. Further he outlined the present status of the Companion specification being framed by the various Mechanical & Plant Engineering working groups under VDMA.

Bangalore session
Like Pune, the event in Bangalore started with the traditional lighting of the lamp, too by the Chief Guest Shri Gaurav Gupta, Principal Secretary, Department of Commerce & Industry and Department of IT, BT and Science & Technology, Government of Karnataka Bangalore flanked by the Professor Amaresh Chakrabarti, Chairman, Centre for Product Design, IISc, Bangalore; Stefan Hoppe, Global Vice President, OPC Foundation; Andreas Faath, Forum Industrie 4.0, VDMA Frankfurt, Germany at VDMA Frankfurt and Rajesh Nath, Managing Director, VDMA India.

In his welcome address, Nath covered the various aspect of Indo-German bi lateral relation, India’s potential as Global manufacturing hub. He also emphasised the importance of adapting Industry 4.0 concept to achieve the ambitious target of making India a global hub for manufacturing, design and innovation, and augmenting the share of manufacturing in the GDP from the currently 17 per cent to 25 per cent by 2022.

Gaurav Gupta the next speaker spoke on “Digital disruption and readiness of Indian industry: Role of the Government”. He also mentioned the role of the state government in sensitising the society on growing digitization and also lauded the inititiatve of VDMA India for organising the symposium at the right juncture.

The Technical I session in Bangalore started with the presentation by Professor Amaresh ChakrabartI on “Industry 4.0: An IISc Perspective”. He illustrated the role of Centre for Product Design in transforming the future of manufacturing in India and urged upon a strong collaboration between industry and academic institutions. In his presentation on “Automation pyramid gets reshaped: Semantic Interoperability is the key of IIoT and Industrie 4.0”, Stefan Hoppe gave an technical introduction on OPC UA and Industrie 4.0 and key of information modelling, impact from IT and the future. He also announced the formation of the OPC India Hub to be hosted by Siemens with strong cooperation with Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and others industrial partners for building an OPC ecosystem for Industrie 4.0 in India.

Post tea break, the technical session continued with the presentation from Smitha Rao, Co-Founder, Utthunga Technologies India and followed by Andreas Faath, Forum Industrie 4.0, VDMA Frankfurt.

Post lunch, there were two speakers under Technical session II in Pune and 3 in Bangalore from Beckhoff Automation, SAP Labs India and Microsoft India.

Jitendra Kr Kataria, Managing Director, Beckhoff Automation India made presentation on “Convergence of IT and OT: Service oriented Architecture (SoA) related automation solutions to reduce engineering efforts” in both the cities in post lunch.

Sathish Karthik Ramu, Product Expert, and Deepak Rai Sharma, Product Expert, from SAP Labs India made their presentation on “Various flavours of Shop Floor to Top Floor integration based on OPC UA and SAP Digital Manufacturing” in Pune and Banaglore respectively. Both of them disseminated the aura of digital manufacturing.

Kumar Shiv Subramanyam, Technical Architect, Microsoft India delivered his presentation on “Azure Industrial IoT preventing vendor lock-in” only in Bangalore. The daylong symposium concluded with a networking tea/coffee and B2B session which offered a good interaction and networking opportunity for both the audience and the participating companies.