As part of our ongoing efforts to drive standardization and interoperability in industrial automation, PLCopen will establish a new working group that will explore incorporating the function blocks we have developed for the OPA-S standard into a new PLCopen standard.
What is OPA-S?
The O-PAS (Open Process Automation Standard) is an open, interoperable, and vendor-neutral standard developed by the Open Process Automation Forum (OPAF) to enable flexible and modular process automation systems. It is designed to replace traditional, proprietary DCS’ with a standards-based, plug-and-play architecture, allowing components from different vendors to work seamlessly together. OPA-S is based on existing industry standards, such as (among others) IEC 61131 & IEC 61499.
Part 6.4 of the O-PAS defines a set of standard function blocks to ensure interoperability, consistency, and comparability across different process automation systems. These FBs provide a reference model with standardized inputs, outputs, and behaviors. By establishing a uniform function block framework, Part 6.4 supports modular automation, making it easier to adopt open, vendor-independent control solutions. PLCopen helped creating several pre-defined function blocks for Part 6.4 of the OPA-S standard.
In order to standardize these function blocks within PLCopen we are starting a new workgroup to create a new PLCopen standard for the process automation