UPDATE 20.12.2022: The feature was released in Prosys OPC UA Simulation Server version 5.4.0 and presented at SPS 2022 and OPC Day Finland 2022

The latest versions of Prosys OPC UA Simulation Server and Prosys OPC UA Browser enable OPC UA PubSub Simulation and Monitoring. Since the Guideline for Open Edge Computation (OEC) published by the Open Industry 4.0 Alliance suggests OPC UA PubSub over MQTT and defines how to deliver OPC UA Device Information over it, it became also very natural to add a simulation of OEC into Prosys OPC UA Simulation Server.

Prosys OPC UA Simulation Server with Device Simulation

We have added a basic Device Simulation into the Simulation Server. This enables manually defining data for a simulated device, including Vendor Nameplate and Device Health information, as defined by the OPC 10000-100 Devices Specification.

Guideline for Open Edge Computing

The Open Industry 4.0 Guideline for Open Edge Computing (OEC) defines how to use OPC UA PubSub over MQTT as a Message Bus.

It also defines a few message types with common contents to publish to the Message Bus.

Please, check out the article about OPC UA and Open Industry 4.0 to get more details about the OEC and these message types.

OI4 Simulation

In order to simulate the OEC message types, the Simulation Server defines a specific Publisher with an MQTT connection to the OEC Message Bus.

The first version of the simulation includes the message types for

• Master Asset Model (mam) message, which corresponds to the Vendor Nameplate defined for the Simulated Device and
• Device Health (health) message, which corresponds to the Device Health defined for the Simulated Device.

The message types are implemented internally by the respective OPC UA PubSub DataSets and DataSetWriters in the OPC UA PubSub Configuration. This enables publishing the messages to the MQTT Broker periodically. OEC defines a few additional fields to the MQTT messages, but apart from that, they are just standard OPC UA PubSub messages.

Subscribing to the OI4 Information with UA Browser

The OEC defines that all OTConnectors that publish data from the devices to the Message Bus, should publish to topics under the ‘oi4’ Topic Tree. Since the messages follow the OPC UA PubSub definitions, we can use the standard Prosys OPC UA Browser to monitor them via the new PubSub View. You just need to connect to the same MQTT Broker as Simulation Server and use the ‘oi4/#’ Topic Filter, to see the messages like this:

SPS 2022

We were demonstrating the Open Industry 4.0 Simulation first time within Prosys OPC UA Simulation Server at the SPS 2022 Trade Show.

OPC Day Finland 2022

Open Industry 4.0 or OPC UA PubSub were also presented at the OPC Day Finland 2022. Ricardo Dunkel (Open Industry 4.0 Alliance) and Konrad Heidrich (Hilscher) were invited to speak together with other top level experts from the OPC Foundation and industry around the world. I was also demonstrating the OPC UA PubSub features in there, and you can find all the presentations from the event home page!