OPC UA enters Building Automation

Erlangen March 2012. ascolab enters into a new initiative to provide connectivity for industrial OPC UA devices and Scada/HMI systems with building automation systems. The goal is to standardize an OPC UA type mapping for the well established communication standards KNX and BACNET and to make their information available in the industrial automation environments. Energy management and production planning systems will be able to combine all information via OPC UA. Building and home automation equipment can be combined with industrial control solutions and can be managed by MES and ERP systems in a consistent OPC UA fashion.

In a first step the OPC Foundation and the BACNET Intrest Group Europe (BIG) agreed on a strategy to combine marketing activities. The technical working group will now create a companion specification that defines the object mapping between OPC UA and BACNET objects.