Heterogenous industrial devices from different OEMs lead to a cumbersome process for end industries to configure, diagnose, calibrate, and maintain them. To add, diversifying Industry 4.0 and IIoT standards mandate such a diverse set of devices to effectively communicate across the industrial network. This, in turn, requires normalizing the data in a specific format before it can be processed on the cloud to reap maximum benefit.
End industries deploy Intelligent Asset Management Systems (IAMS) to collect, consolidate, transfer, and analyze complex device data from the plant floor. However, the limited capabilities of most of the IAMS applications in the market to achieve complete data-standardizing in the required format prevent effective information exchange with OPC UA clients.
Utthunga’s uDDx Suite
Utthunga’s DTM-supported Device Data Exchange (uDDx) suite is integrated with IAMS communication channels. This helps transfer bundles of normalized data between the plant floor and OPC UA clients. Compatible with various IAMS applications, the uDDx application converts non-standardized parameters from different devices into a uniform standard. This helps seamless information exchange between the field devices and various cloud applications.
By standardizing data across numerous OEM devices, uDDx application empowers end industries to harness the power of cloud technologies. Thus, standardization and consolidation of scattered data offer much-needed remote operation capabilities of field devices and facilitate virtual data processing, analysis, diagnostics, and maintenance.
uDDx supports all the device integration standards like EDD, FDI package, and DTM. It integrates the IT and OT layers of the industrial plants by standardizing the instrument parameters as mentioned in PA-DIM (Process Automation Device Information Model). The uDDx Suite installed in the IAMS application uses the system’s DD library and interprets them as DTMs.
The current features offered by the uDDx Suite Software are:
- Supports FDT DTMs 1.2
- Supports all HART protocol field devices
Image : Information Exchange Through uDDx Suite
uDDx Suite is designed to work with NAMUR Open Architecture (NOA) framework. It also maps field device classes to standards as defined in PA-DIM. Such a two-edged capability standardizes scattered data across all levels of an industrial plant. This enables unlocking and communicating complex data without affecting the traditional automation structure.
Image : uDDx Suite – Device Data Access & Flow From Shopfloor to Cloud
Benefits of uDDx Suite
- Protocol-agnostic unified information model
- Fulfills requirements of Asset Administration Shell
- Offers end-to-end singed and data encrypted data stream
- Fits with a host of IAMS applications, without much change needed to the plant network