More information on the IIC, Industry 4.0 and IoT can be found in this interview with Tony Shakib of Cisco and Stefan Schönegger and Marc Ostertag of B&R.
Actively shaping the future of industry
At the Hannover Messe, B&R announced its membership in the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC). "B&R and the IIC share a common goal. We want to create an industrial environment where intelligent devices, machines, processes and data are all networked together," explained Marketing Manager Stefan Schönegger. "Together with the IIC's founding members – Cisco, GE, IBM and Intel – as well as its other member companies, we aim to play an active role in moving concepts based on the Internet of Things (IoT) rapidly from theory to full-scale production."
According to the IIC, this industrial future must be built on a common architecture, open standards and systems that are able to interact seamlessly. "The boundaries between Internet and automation technologies will continue to dissolve in the years to come," continued Schönegger. "We've been following this approach in our own production facilities for some time now, and we're happy to contribute our experience to the IIC's working groups."
Participation in TSN testbed
B&R's involvement includes participation in the IIC's "Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) Testbed", where the combination of TSN and OPC UA is being tested for the first time in an industrial environment. TSN is an extension of the IEEE 802.1 Ethernet standard that aims to give OPC UA real-time capability that opens up interface-free communication from the sensor layer to the ERP layer.
