Laboratory and Analytical Device Standard (LADS): A Communication Standard Based on OPC UA for Networked Laboratories

In a similar vein to Industry 4.0 in manufacturing industries, digitisation is making inroads in the laboratory industry in the form of Laboratory 4.0, or networked laboratories. Companies can gain decisive competitive edges by automating their work processes and systems and networking them with each other and primary IT systems. A uniform communication standard such as OPC UA, a well-established global standard in the aforementioned manufacturing industries, is essential to a modular, scalable network of heterogeneous laboratory structures. Can the laboratory industry benefit from this standard and the years of development experience? In SPECTARIS, the German Industry Association for Optics, Photonics, Analytical and Medical Technologies, over 30 global market leaders, hidden champions and drivers of innovation in the laboratory industry put their heads together in the "Networked Laboratory Devices" working group and created the "Laboratory and Analytical Device Standard", or LADS for short. Unlike numerous other attempts to establish communication standards for laboratories, LADS is based on the advanced OPC UA standard and takes an agnostic approach to cover the variety of devices, systems and requirements in laboratories. In this context, "agnostic" refers to the generic design and display of potentially as-yet-unknown aspects of the flow of information or communication structures. For the first time, LADS allows for modular, scalable networking of heterogeneous laboratory structures, efficient data transfers and - currently unused - user, process and device-based data analysis (keywords: big data, predictive analytics, data science) - even taking normative requirements into consideration. This agnostic modelling makes LADS a future-proof communication solution for the laboratory industry, the likes of which the world has never seen.