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Communication in Industry 4.0 with Wolfram SystemModeler and OPC UA

Background

Explore the contents of this article with a free Wolfram SystemModeler trial. Industry 4.0, the fourth industrial revolution of cyber-physical systems, is on the way! With it come sensors and boards that are much cheaper than they used to be. All of these components are connected through some kind of network or cloud so that they are able to talk to each other. This is where the OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA) comes in. OPC UA is a machine-to-machine communication protocol for industrial automation. It is designed to be the successor to the older OPC Classic protocol that is bound to the Microsoft-only process exchange COM/DCOM (if you are interested in the OPCClassic library for Wolfram SystemModeler, you can find it here).
Markus Dahl, Applications Engineer, SystemModeler
Education & Academic

Apply Now for the 15th Annual Wolfram Summer School

This year's Wolfram Summer School will be held at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts, from June 18 to July 7, 2017. Maybe you're a researcher who wants to study the dynamics of galaxies with cellular automata. Perhaps you're an innovator who wants to create a way to read time from pictures of analog clocks or build a new startup with products that use RFID (radio-frequency identification) to track objects. You might be an educator who wants to build an algebra feedback system or write a textbook that teaches designers how to disinvent the need for air conditioning. These projects show the diversity and creativity of some of our recent Summer School students. Does this sound like you? If so, we want you to join us this summer!
Lizzie Turner, Team Manager, Advanced Research Group
Announcements & Events

The R&D Pipeline Continues: Launching Version 11.1

A Minor Release That’s Not Minor I’m pleased to announce the release today of Version 11.1 of the Wolfram Language (and Mathematica). As of now, Version 11.1 is what’s running in the Wolfram Cloud—and desktop versions are available for immediate download for Mac, Windows and Linux. What’s new in Version 11.1? Well, actually a remarkable […]

Stephen Wolfram
Best of Blog

Hidden Figures: Modern Approaches to Orbit and Reentry Calculations

The movie Hidden Figures was released in theaters recently and has been getting good reviews. It also deals with an important time in US history, touching on a number of topics, including civil rights and the Space Race. The movie details the hidden story of Katherine Johnson and her coworkers (Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson) at NASA during the Mercury missions and the United States' early explorations into manned space flight. The movie focuses heavily on the dramatic civil rights struggle of African American women in NASA at the time, and these struggles are set against the number-crunching ability of Johnson and her coworkers. Computers were in their early days at this time, so Johnson and her team's ability to perform complicated navigational orbital mechanics problems without the use of a computer provided an important sanity check against the early computer results.
Jeff Bryant, et al.
Computation & Analysis

How Many Animals and Arp-imals Can One Find in a Random 3D Image?

And How Many Animals, Animal Heads, Human Faces, Aliens and Ghosts in Their 2D Projections?

Introduction

In my recent Wolfram Community post, "How many animals can one find in a random image?," I looked into the pareidolia phenomenon from the viewpoints of pixel clusters in random (2D) black-and-white images. Here are some of the shapes I found, extracted, rotated, smoothed and colored from the connected black pixel clusters of a single 800x800 image of randomly chosen, uncorrelated black-and-white pixels.
Michael Trott, Chief Scientist, Wolfram|Alpha Scientific Content
Best of Blog

Analyzing and Translating an Alien Language: Arrival, Logograms and the Wolfram Language

If aliens actually visited Earth, world leaders would bring in a scientist to develop a process for understanding their language. So when director Denis Villeneuve began working on the science fiction movie Arrival, he and his team turned to real-life computer scientists Stephen and Christopher Wolfram to bring authentic science to the big screen. Christopher specifically was tasked with analyzing and writing code for a fictional nonlinear visual language. On January 31, he demonstrated the development process he went through in a livecoding event you can watch on YouTube.
Michael Gammon, Blog Administrator, Document & Media Systems
Announcements & Events

Meet the Authors of Hands-on Start to Wolfram Mathematica, Second Edition

Jeremy Sykes: To celebrate the release of Hands-on Start to Wolfram Mathematica and Programming with the Wolfram Language (HOS2), now in its second edition, I sat down with the authors. Working with Cliff, Kelvin and Michael as the book's production manager has been an easy and engaging process. I'm thrilled to see the second edition in print, particularly now in its smaller, more conveniently sized format.
Jeremy Sykes, Publishing Supervisor, Document & Media Systems
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