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The thrust towards infrastructure development is increasing at a brisk pace which boosts the demand for construction equipment. Industry estimates increasing pull towards equipment such as backhoe loaders, compactors, excavators, and mobile cranes with urbanisation and industrial activities booming across the country. Manufacturers are keen to compete in the challenging market by building equipment that is feature-rich and at the same time serves growing demands.

The innovation cycles are faster, and equipment manufacturers put intense effort into bringing best-in-class functions to stay ahead in the competition. With new addons and innovations, the complexity of machines on the shopfloor is increasing than ever. Networking of devices and systems becomes vital to ensure interoperability on the shop floor. With open communication standards, manufacturers can seamlessly establish a connected factory ecosystem.

Adoption of open standards in industry witness strong growth

The culture of openness is gaining prominent space in the construction equipment industry. Gone are the times where manufacturers were tied to a monopoly approach in machine controls and operations. The traditional production process suffered from a lack of connectivity between machines and machines to IT systems such as MES/ERP/databases. It required high resource effort to converge all systems to a common platform. The traditional process had a dearth of multi-vendor interoperability resulting in a fragmented ecosystem, causing machines to operate in silos. Factory managers were challenged to seek different technologies to establish a connected factory approach.

With the adoption of open standards, the construction industry has become more scalable, flexible, and prepared for new commitments. The influx of open standards in industrial communication is poised to add value in maximum asset utilisation and bring versatility to the production process.

OPC UA is leading the way for future-ready industrial communication

Industrial communication is evolving with the pace of digital transformation. As the number of machines and devices increases on the shop floor, the need for network bandwidth grows. In addition, factory managers witness significant data handling, simple diagnostics, plug and produce user experience, and cybersecurity becoming a defacto requirement for industrial communication.

The growing conditions are addressed using open communication standard OPC UA. OPC UA is eliminating the need for traditional Fieldbus networks. It is an open, vendor-neutral, platform-independent communication standard developed to address the lack of seamless interoperability. The soft facts like easy implementation, openness, vendor-independent, risk avoidance, conformity, interoperability, long-term availability, and overall distribution make OPC UA gain acceptance in construction equipment manufacturing.

OPC UA is a leading communication standard for industry 4.0, enabling manufacturers to scale their products for future requirements quickly. Intelligent networking of factories requires a common language precisely delivered by OPC UA, making it an essential instrument for the implementation of Industry 4.0. OPC UA is the recommended communication standard for the reference architecture model for Industry 4.0 (RAMI 4.0). As a pioneer in open communication standards, B&R has made OPC UA a built-in communication protocol in all its control systems, enabling manufacturers to choose the platform needed to access the machine data freely.

End to end shop floor integration

The construction equipment industry encounters the need for machine-to-machine (M2M) communication to optimise machine operation, predictive maintenance functions, and so on. Shop floor machines and field devices are increasingly expected to process and combine data from multiple devices instead of just sending their raw data. The collective application of machines from different vendors must be integrated on a unified network that simplifies the job for factory operators to process them.

OPC UA makes M2M communication seamless than ever, and it interacts with any component in the automation landscape of the factory. Beyond simple data sharing, OPC UA facilitates rich information exchange, using a semantic metadata model that describes the data and its purpose to create value from the data directly. It becomes crucial when large amounts of data are aggregated from a diverse ecosystem of third-party systems.

IT/OT convergence gets simpler than ever

Information technology has become an integral part of the shop floor. Therefore, in addition to M2M communication, vertical integration of factory-level networks is essential. OPC UA has been ideal for incorporating machine data to the enterprise level, including SCADA/MES/ERP/Cloud-based infrastructure. Factory managers can integrate third-party systems running on Windows and Linux for asset monitoring, predictive maintenance, energy management, etc.  OPC UA is realised on any hardware and software platform that scales with CPU architecture like Intel, ARM, PPC, etc.  OPC UA runs on all operating systems and is implemented in all languages such as Ansi C/C++, .NET, and Java.

OPC UA fulfills the capabilities demanded by an edge controller. With its local and global discovery function, an edge controller identifies multiple machines on the network and access data in real-time. In addition, OPC UA integrates brownfield machines running on the traditional network to a digital platform. Using protocol converters, the devices equipped with the conventional bus network are migrated to the OPC UA platform, exposing relevant data to upstream networks. It proves to be a single unified protocol to converge shop floor systems with enterprise-level making way for Industrial IoT implementation.

Secured communication for hassle-free function

OPC UA enables the production line to connect and share data mutually with IT systems in a unified and more accessible way, thereby offering complete visibility of end-to-end operations on the shop floor. With the increased volume of data, there is also raised concern on data security by the manufacturers. They are keen on ensuring data generated from the process line is accessed only by authorised personnel. Hence it adds to the responsibility of the automation system to address data security demand. OPC UA is secure by design. OPC UA provides mechanisms for application and user authentication. It further includes signed and encrypted transfer mechanisms for data integrity and confidentiality. Built-in security features of OPC UA acknowledge IT norms essential to have seamless data exchange demanded by the industry.

A connected ecosystem becomes a reality

The communication in construction equipment industry has sharply evolved over the decades. It has become an important catalyst influencing how devices, machines, and systems exchange crucial and time-critical information across the entire value chain. The eminent need for data from the factory floor to optimise the process and improve efficiency has pushed the demand for a connected ecosystem. The vision of a connected ecosystem can be realised only when the underlying communication network in the factory is based on global standards. OPC UA addresses various demands of the smart factory through its proven and class-leading features. B&R has tightly incorporated OPC UA in all its automation products, enabling manufacturers to leverage the benefit of global standards and become competent and future-ready.