Auto Generation of SM Profiles Using the OPC UA – MTConnect Companion Specification
Project Lead: Commonwealth Center for Advanced Manufacturing (CCAM)
Partners: The Association for Manufacturing Technology (AMT), Beeond
Member % Cost Share: 50%
CESMII % Cost Share: 50%
Duration: 6 Months
Problem Statement
- Building a profile inside the SMIP is a manual process limiting the rate of adoption of the platform
- The utility of the information model in the SMIP is limited by lack of coherence between OPC UA Companion specification information models and SMIP device profiles
Project Goal
Enable a streamlined workflow for introducing and connecting new and existing equipment into the Smart Manufacturing Innovation Platform (SMIP) while maintaining coherence with OPC UA information models.
Technical Approach
- Model – Create an OPC UA information model for an EOS 290M machine which conforms to the OPC UA-MTC companion spec using Beeond’s UMX Pro modeling software.
- Configure – Develop a lightweight toolset to automate the translation and import of the OPC UA nodeset to an SM profile.
- Connect – Automatically instantiate an OPC UA server based on the modeled device using Beeond toolset. The team will work with CESMII and ThinkIQ to explore automation of the mapping of data items from specific machine instances to instances of the SM profile and ingest data to the SMIP from the OPC UA server.
Key Tasks & Milestones
Task 1 Discovery and Device Modeling
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- Deliverable: Documentation and inspect the EOS M290 Direct Metal Laser Sintering machine and its components and sub-systems.
Task 2 Deployment of Edge Server
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- Deliverable: Functional OPC UA server deployed and configured using the developed information model from Task 1, and connected to the DMLS machine serving up standard compliant data.
Task 3 Configure SMIP platform and develop OPC UA connector
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- Deliverable: A proven and repeatable implementation of a fully semantically modeled data ingestion pipeline from machine to SMIP. Along with any tools or utilities used to deploy this solution.
Task 4 Dashboard development and documentation
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- Deliverable: Final documentation which may include but is not limited to: How-to instructions, user manuals, and evaluations of areas for improvement.
Potential Impact
- Faster, cheaper device integration into the Smart Manufacturing Platform
- Faster, cheaper industrial systems integration of OPC UA and/or MTConnect compliant devices
- Industry can leverage coherent, composable information models and associated SMIP profiles to allow a wide variety of devices to integrate with any application by leveraging OPC UA information models
Benefits
- Dramatically increase the volume and development pace of SMIP Profiles
- Increase the appeal of the SMIP by reducing overall integration time
- The reusable profile for a DLMS 3D printer assists with SMIP adoption in Additive Manufacturing
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