Industrial automation has relied on familiar communication protocols for decades. OPC UA, Modbus, EtherNet/IP, PROFINET, and MQTT were all created to move values efficiently, expose tags, and support deterministic control on the plant floor. For many years, that was enough. When systems only needed to exchange raw data, these protocols handled the job without much trouble.
That environment has changed. Plants now depend on MES platforms, historians, analytics tools, custom applications, and a growing set of AI driven systems. All of these tools pull from the same operational data, but they also need a clearer sense of what that data represents and what actions they are allowed to take. Tasks like reading data, recording events, or running an operation all depend on the context that older protocols were never designed to carry. That is where things start to fall apart. Systems can move data, but they do not share a common understanding of what that data means. Read More
