British edge software company IOTech has released a major upgrade for its real-time embedded OT software platform, Edge XRT. Edge XRT 2.0 provides extended OT connectivity, auto-discovery for easy device onboarding, a new MQTT API to simplify integration and management and improved performance and scalability

Edge XRT is designed for high-performance edge computing use cases such as industrial control and real-time signal processing applications. These include factory automation and building management. It also enables integration between real-time edge applications and higher-level enterprise IT, SCADA and cloud applications.

The latest version is intended to designed to simplify development of OT applications and cut time-to-production for edge systems. It is hardware agnostic, independent of silicon provider (Intel or ARM) and operating system. Users can deploy it as a native application, containerised and/or into a virtualised environment.

Edge XRT 2.0 can also be used for microcontroller-based applications where CPU and memory resources are limited. This makes it suitable for use cases such as connected commercial or consumer electronic devices, medical device applications or automotive engine management systems.

The product’s open APIs make third-party application integration very easy. Major industrial OEMs and ISVs are leveraging the product’s multi-vendor OT connectivity, cloud interoperability and high-performance, real-time edge processing capabilities to create a new generation of protocol-agnostic edge solutions.

“As a configurable, embeddable, high-performance OT platform, Edge XRT 2.0 is unique,” said Andrew Foster, Product Director at IOTech. “It provides a rich set of OT and IoT capabilities that our customers can easily use to create their own edge solutions. In most cases, this is through simple configuration without the need for lots of custom code.”

New features of the software platform include:

• OT connectivity: In addition the existing pluggable OT connectivity for Modbus, EtherNet/IP and EtherCAT, BACnet and OPC UA protocols, the platform now supports PROFINET, S7, GPS and BLE.
• For protocols that support device discovery such as OPC UA, BACnet and EtherNet/IP, devices can be discovered and then onboarded easily without any manual configuration.
• A new MQTT API allows Edge XRT clients to manage the lifecycle of connected device/sensors, support read/write OT data access, control device discovery and resource scheduling.
• When deployed on an Azure Sphere device, an Edge XRT application can now be dynamically configured and reconfigured via a Device Twin running on Azure IoT Hub.

IOTech has also made scalability and performance improvements to address customer demand for concurrent access to an increasing number of OT devices and their data.