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Glossary · Manufacturing and logistics

OPC UA

OPC UA is an open industrial communication standard that lets machines, PLCs and software from different vendors exchange data securely and with a common information model.

OPC UA: the details

It is maintained by the OPC Foundation, was released in 2008 and is published as IEC 62541. It replaces classic OPC, which depended on Windows. An OPC UA server—usually the PLC itself or a gateway—exposes variables organized in a tree with meaning: not just a value, but what it is, which unit it’s in and which equipment it belongs to. A client subscribes and receives the changes.

It includes encryption and certificate-based authentication, which makes it possible to pull data from the plant without opening the control network more than necessary. It coexists with other protocols: Modbus is still present in older equipment and MQTT is common for carrying data to the cloud. A real project almost always has to read from several.

OPC UA in a project

We use it to read counters, states and alarms straight from the machine, always read-only and over the network the maintenance team authorizes.

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Where we apply it

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Glossary

Related terms

See the whole glossary
  • SCADASupervisory Control and Data Acquisition
  • MESManufacturing Execution System
  • OEEOverall Equipment Effectiveness

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