OPC UA Introduction
OPC UA is the vertical communication in production floor used for m2m (machine to Machine) and from controller all the way up to the cloud.
softMC is OPC UA server, any OPC UA client can connect to softMC via TCP/IP and explore all softMC global variables
This is the main method to implement Industrie 4.0 m2m with the softMC.
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For example user can read power or temperature of any servo drive via the softMC and take action.
OPC UA is an open and royalty free set of standards designed as a universal communication protocol key advantages:
– A state of art security model.
– A fault tolerant communication protocol.
– An information modelling framework that allows application developers to represent their data in a way
that makes sense to them.
OPC UA has a broad scope which delivers for economies of scale for application developers. This means that
a larger number of high quality applications at a reasonable cost are available.
The OPC UA model is scalable from small devices to ERP systems. OPC UA Servers process information
locally and then provide that data in a consistent format to any application requesting data - ERP, MES, PMS,
Maintenance Systems, HMI, Smartphone or a standard Browser, for examples.
Basics of OPC UA
As an open standard, OPC UA is based on standard internet technologies, like TCP/IP, HTTP, Web Sockets.
As an extensible standard, OPC UA provides a set of Services and a basic information
model framework. This framework provides an easy manner for creating and exposing vendor defined
information in a standard way. More importantly all OPC UA Clients are expected to be able to discover and
use vendor-defined information. This means OPC UA users can benefit from the economies of scale that
come with generic visualization and historian applications. This specification is an example of an OPC UA
Information Model designed to meet the needs of developers and users.
OPC UA Clients can be any consumer of data from another device on the network to browser based thin clients and ERP systems.