UMH Systems (United Manufacturing Hub)
Canvas Category Software : Operational Technology : IIoT
UMH Systems GmbH is the company behind the United Manufacturing Hub.
Assembly Line
OPC UA is the Peak of All That Is Wrong in Manufacturing
It couldn’t get much worse. On one hand, manufacturers are wasting substantial amounts of time and money attempting to implement OPC UA. On the other hand, it’s driving innovation because its shortcomings are almost comically obvious that more and more companies feel fooled by established market vendors and begin seeking alternative solutions. They are frustrated with the status-quo and want to advance into the 21st century.
Top three reasons -
- Practical Applications of OPC UA Can Be Highly Unreliable
- It is a Security Nightmare
- OPC UA Managed to Standardize Without Actually Standardizing Anything
OPC UA has become emblematic of the challenges within manufacturing, yet this also opens a door for opportunity. The shortcomings of established vendors, who appear trapped in methodologies of the 90s, have inadvertently paved the path for innovation. Among the frustrated users of OPC UA, movements like the Unified Namespace community are gaining momentum and advocating for change.
Exploring Manufacturing Databases with James Sewell
How United Manufacturing Hub Is Introducing Open Source to Manufacturing and Using Time-Series Data for Predictive Maintenance
The United Manufacturing Hub is an open-source Helm chart for Kubernetes, which combines state-of-the-art IT/OT tools and technologies and brings them into the hands of the engineer. This allows us to standardize the IT/OT infrastructure across customers and makes the entire infrastructure easy to integrate and maintain. We typically deploy it on the edge and on-premise using k3s as light Kubernetes. In the cloud, we use managed Kubernetes services like AKS. If the customer is scaling out and okay with using the cloud, we recommend services like Timescale Cloud. We are using TimescaleDB with MQTT, Kafka, and Grafana. We have microservices to subscribe to the messages from the message brokers MQTT and Kafka and insert the data into TimescaleDB, as well as a microservice that reads out data and processes it before sending it to a Grafana plugin, which then allows for visualization.
We are currently positioning the United Manufacturing Hub with TimescaleDB as an open-source Historian. To achieve this, we are currently developing a user interface on top of the UMH so that OT engineers can use it and IT can still maintain it.