Centria University of Applied Sciences
OPC UA Online Workshop
About Centria
Centria University of Applied Sciences, research and development department currently employs around 110 staff members. There are about 80 R&D projects ongoing each year. The aim is to develop the expertise for the companies and organizations, in order to enhance their activities and competitiveness. The goal is to both provide and create new knowledge, skills and technologies for the local businesses and industries.
Centria’s R&D is closely linked to teaching activities, which allows university students to benefit from a learning environment based on the real working life. Currently Centria executes several projects with industrial and high-tech companies, where Industry 4.0 smart systems are developed and OPC UA communications can be used.
OPC UA Workshops
Over the years Prosys has organized over 70 OPC and OPC UA workshops and trained over 600 experts. Thus, the training material and exercises are based on prominent practical experience as well as knowledge of the relevant standard specifications. In addition to public workshops, Prosys also provides customized training for the clients when there are large number of participants from the same company, special needs in terms of topics and time, or training is needed at a particular site.
Usage of OPC UA is increasing due to its wide acceptance as enabler of Industry 4.0 and other smart systems. However, it might take quite a while to understand all the details of OPC UA specifications, technology and best practices. Or even to grasp the basics of everything that OPC UA includes: address spaces, namespaces, subscriptions, events, alarms, history data, method calls and all that information modeling capability, not to mention the security.
Public workshops are hosted every year in several countries and today, also as an independent online event. When going online, Prosys uses virtual classroom technology that allows participants to access the workshop from any place in the world. Furthermore, they can also skip the time-consuming travelling and related costs.
Using an online platform, Prosys instructor presents the training materials and performs demonstrations on a shared screen. The participant works on his own exercises and can ask help from the instructor, who monitors the progress online. Voice and desktop control system permits the communication and fixing of problems. As a result, workshop attendees learn by following the demonstrations, interacting with others as well as doing the exercises - like in a live classroom.
Prosys obviously master OPC UA, can provide you with great tools and assist with all the details that you
might ask about. However, the main question for us before we attended their OPC UA Online Workshop, was
whether the online course can function as well as the normal course. To our surprise, the online platform that
they are using is working very well in practice.
When attending online training, you can follow the presentations even better with your own screen and
headphones. They also have a virtual machine prepared for everyone for the exercises, which saves you from
setting all up yourself. We found the online platform fast and flexible, and you can also get individual
assistance.
Overall, we can fully recommend this training. The introduction is loaded of information about OPC UA
technology, and the practical part provides hands-on exercises that will help you to get your first client and
server applications up and running. From organizational perspective, workshop in online format was very easy
and flexible to attend and offered savings in travel expenses.
Janne Känsäkoski
Development Manager, R&D, Digitalization, Centria
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What is OPC?
OPC and OPC UA (Unified Architecture) are industry standards that enable software to connect devices, machines and systems from different manufacturers using same interface.
