Openness, Productivity, Connectivity

According to Automsoft's Tony Prylowski, for a typical Scada system around 30 per cent of engineering development time will be spent writing driver software, just to enable the system to interface with the host of proprietary control devices currently on the market.

As a member of the OPC European steering committee, Prylowski is at the forefront of the push to get wider acceptance of an industry standard that can provide true `plug-and-play' capability for process control and factory automation. Originally standing for OLE (object linking and embedding) for Process Control, OPC is promoted by the OPC Foundation, set up in 1996 by leading control vendors to develop `an open and interoperable interface standard, based on the functional requirements of Microsoft's OLE/COM and DCOM technology, that fosters greater interoperability between automation/control applications, field systems/devices, and business/office applications.'

Although OLE has since been renamed ActiveX, the OPC goals remain the same. The foundation now has over 200 members - vendors and end-users - and a board of directors representing leading control companies such as Siemens, Fisher-Rosemount, Honeywell, Toshiba, Intellution and Rockwell.

There are nearly 200 OPC-compliant products, such as Automsoft's Rapid historian, currently on the market, and OPC Europe has now set up a factory model on which products of different vendors can be tested for true OPC compliancy. For more details visit: www.opcfoundation.org