Benefits of OPC-UA

Mobiform believes that the future of process control and building management relies on OPC UA. OPC UA was developed by the OPC Foundation and many of its members to provide a way to communicate to all divisions of the organization and to share information.

In today’s market we need to get out of the mindset of not sharing information. Look at all the social networking sites, I mean I can go to Facebook and know when my brother or a friend stops at a restaurant. But that has not quite caught on in the industrial market, but it’s starting to. Companies need to share information with all divisions of their business in order to become more efficient. For example a company leaves work for the day and an employee has forgotten to turn off a machine, or an office light. That month the plant manager notices that the energy consumption for the company was considerably higher when compared to last week, for no apparent reason. Well without the sharing of data it could take months before the company realizes the problem, if they even realize it which could mean an increase in that companies’ expenses which reduce profit, as we all know. With OPC UA the plan is to share this information across all divisions of the company, so an event will be fired or a person notified if a machine or office light is left on.

Some key benefits of OPC UA include the following:

· Modeling the data

· Co-Exist with OPC classic (DA)

· Platform Independent

· Security

· Discovery

· Vendor Independence

· No DCOM

Modeling the Data-OPC UA architecture provides a foundation to build application and enterprise specific information models. This allows for vendors to design their system with the information models in mind which we allow for a quicker configuration of the applications and HMI screens. So for example OPC UA can model a Motor, and this motor would have tags or as OPC UA refers properties and these properties would have values associated with them. You could break down that even further and have a specific part on the Motor as a model and associated properties with that model. This will make for easier navigation in the tag browsing panel when binding the HMI screens.

Co-Exist with OPC Classic-OPC UA is built to be used with the other forms of OPC. So you can take your existing OPC Servers and wrap them with the OPC UA technology.

Platform Independent- the OPC UA server has been written to be platform independent. What this means to the end user is that you can now communicate to a UA server whether it is on a windows machine, Linux, or embedded on a computer chip. This allows for your HMI client to display information coming from other sources that no one else in the business has seen before. With more information companies can become more efficient, and sharing this information is the key. The plant or office manager could have no idea that equipment or a light has been left on costing the company thousands of dollars in electricity cost, not to mention increased in maintenance. But by sharing this information across the company they can address and fix the issues, resulting in a larger profit at the end of the day.

Security- OPC UA has been built with security in mind. All vendors that will support OPC UA will have this functionality. Both the OPC UA Sever and Client with validate each other through the use of certificates. The messages that the OPC UA server and the OPC UA client send can be encrypted and will only be decrypted by a validated client or server through the use of certificates.

Vendor Independence-of course vendor independence has been one of the main goals of OPC since its inception. The end user should not be locked into one specific vendor for any given task. OPC UA allows the end user the freedom to pick and choose the vendor that is right for the specific task at hand.

NO DCOM-one of the biggest benefits prior users of OPC will notice is there is no need to configure the clients for DCOM. OPC UA is DCOM free! OPC UA can communicate by standard HTTP or through a UA TCP port, or any other port that the admin has set up.