Siemens SINUMERIK 840DE sl Commissioning Manual page 923

Introduction
1.1 General description
Uniform standard for data exchange
Industry 4.0 stands for the intensive utilization, evaluation and analysis of data from the
production in IT systems of the enterprise level. PLC programs today already record a wide
range of data at the production and process level (pressure values, temperatures and counter
readings) and make them available to systems at the enterprise level, for example, to increase
the product quality. With Industry 4.0, the data exchange between the production and
enterprise levels will increase much faster in the future. However, prerequisite for the success
of Industry 4.0 is a uniform standard for data exchange.
The OPC UA (Unified Architecture) standard is particularly suitable for data exchange across
different levels as it is independent from specific operating systems, has secure transfer
procedures and better semantic description of the data. OPC UA not only makes data available,
but also provides information about the data (e.g. data types). This enables machine-
interpretable access to the data.
1.1.1 SINUMERIK OPC UA server
The SINUMERIK OPC UA server offers a communication interface with manufacturer
independent standard. The information on SINUMERIK controls can be exchanged with an
OPC UA client using this communication interface.
The client is not part of SINUMERIK and is either part of standard software or can be developed
as part of individual software. For this purpose a stack for downloading is provided by the OPC
foundation.
Some manufacturers provide a software development kit, which can be used to develop an
OPC UA client.
SINUMERIK Integrate for Engineering Access MyMachine / OPC UA
Configuration Manual, 12/2017, 6FC5397-1DP40-6BA1
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