Key highlights
- UNS provides a centralized, standardized structure for organizing and accessing data across various systems and devices.
- By supporting multiple communication protocols (e.g., OPC UA, MQTT, EtherNet/IP, Profibus, TSN), UNS helps bridge the gap between older control systems and new IIoT technologies.
Though they’re also playing catch-up, standards and common practices can also help keep IIoT grounded in reality and practicality.
“Many standards measure success by level of adoption, but they must be worth more in practice than the paper they’re printed on,” says Tom Burke, global strategic advisor for the CC-Link Partner Association. “One method that’s enabling IIoT efforts lately is Unified Name Space (UNS), which has become a popular way to help users get data from different devices and networks. It uses a common naming strategy that establishes a single source of truth across applications. This lets users easily discover their devices by making them all the same, which allows them to quickly access what they need and understand it.”
UNS is defined as a software-based framework that organizes, centralizes and standardizes information from multiple sources in an organization. It’s often used with Discord servers, which provide virtual spaces for many communal activities. Burke reports there are many ways to implement UNS, including roping in OPC Unified Architecture (UA) networking strategy and Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) publish-subscribe messaging protocol, which already brokers communications between many IIoT applications and devices.
“A centralized MQTT broker enables preprocessing of content before it reaches UNS,” explains Burke. “Once there, this preprocessing lets users understand formerly raw data, and use it in real time, which can help simplify their entire data strategy.”
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Burke adds the primary characteristics of UNS include:
- Standardized data model that applies to many locations and systems, and harmonizes information into a common, well-defined structure.
- Presentation layer, such as MQTT, that serves as a centralized data hub, where users can publish information and subscribe to access it.
- Allowing multiple networking protocols and communication methods on the same physical wire, such as time-sensitive networking (TSN), CC-Link, Profibus/Profinet, EtherNet/IP, OPC UA, EtherCAT and others.
- Simplification that lets users access and secure data from any device, no matter where it’s located in a network hierarchy.
“TSN enables communications, such as giving historical data to the presentation layer, and letting communications go back to help make comparisons. However, its rules also preserve the determinism of TCP/IP operations traffic by preventing interference by non-real-time communications,” adds Burke. “This lets users process their data and perform other tasks without affecting any control functions.”
Burke adds that UNS’s common naming and standard formatting can simplify communications and data access so much that they’ll likely enable device-level interoperability as well. “UNS is like a universal translator. It lets anyone publish whatever by going to a broker like MQTT, and letting anyone else understand that data,” says Burke. “For example, UNS can take standard O-PAS data models, such as those for pharmaceutical processes, and publish them for consumption.”
