Alexander Ziegler is technology and innovation manager at Siemens in Karlsruhe and is responsible for innovation and standardization activities for Siemens industrial networks and communication systems. He received his electrical engineering diploma from the Georg-Simon-Ohm University in Nuremberg. In the beginning of his career he worked as a system architect for embedded industrial communication. His major areas of expertise are real-time communication systems, TSN, DetNet, 5G and SDN.

Alexander is chairman and editor of the OPC UA TSN sub-group which is specifying the QoS/TSN information model for OPC devices in cooperation with the working groups of the OPC Field Level Communication (FLC) initiative.

Future OPC FLC (Field Level Communication) applications like C2C or C2D have higher demands regarding real-time communication than traditional OPC UA applications based on UA Client Server. They will use cyclic or isochronous traffic types over a converged industrial network which is supported by a set of QoS/TSN mechanisms providing guaranteed bandwidth and maximum latency.

For these use cases the OPC UA TSN sub-group amends the existing OPC UA base information models to allow configuration and monitoring of QoS settings, TSN streams and network interfaces. The group also specifies configuration workflows between OPC PubSub devices and the network control layer based on either a distributed or a centralized TSN configuration model.

A clear abstraction between application and network is essential to keep the architecture of OPC UA adaptable to future changes in the network layer and vice versa. Not only because the work on TSN configuration standards in the IEEE, IEC and OPC FLC is still ongoing but also because of new upcoming network technologies offering industrial grade QoS like DetNet and 5G. The presentation provides an overview of the progress of the working group and their cooperation with related OPC WGs.