Opc Ua Communication; What You Need To Know About Opc Ua; Opc Ua And Industrie 4.0; General Features Of Opc Ua - Siemens SIMATIC S7-1500 Function Manual

OPC UA communication

9.1

What you need to know about OPC UA

9.1.1

OPC UA and Industrie 4.0

Uniform standard for information and data exchange
Industry 4.0 stands for the intensive utilization, evaluation and analysis of the large volumes
of data from production in IT systems at the enterprise level. With Industry 4.0, data
exchange between the production and enterprise levels is rapidly increasing. However, a
prerequisite for success is a uniform standard for the information and data exchange.
Classic OPC only runs on Windows operating systems. To get around this restriction, the
OPC Foundation developed the OPC UA (OPC Unified Architecture) standard.
The OPC UA standard is particularly suitable for data exchange across different levels
thanks to its independence from specific operating systems, its secure transfer procedures
and the semantic description of data. Machine data (controlled variables, measured values
or parameters) can also be transferred in this way.
An important component of this concept is that OPC UA communication can take place in
parallel with real-time communication for time-critical, machine-level data transfer.
OPC UA is highly scalable so that a consistent information exchange between sensors,
controllers and MES or ERP systems is possible.
OPC UA makes available not only data but also information about the data (data types), at
the same time making possible machine-interpretable access to the data.
9.1.2

General features of OPC UA

OPC UA and PROFINET
OPC UA and PROFINET can be used together. The two protocols use the same network
infrastructure.
Independence from the operating system
The OPC UA standard is platform-independent and uses an optimized TCP-based binary
protocol for high-performance applications.
OPC UA can be used, for example, under Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, a realtime operating
system or a mobile operating system (Android or iOS).
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9
Communication