Research and development of OPC client-server architectures for manufacturing and process automation

Abstract

The OPC (Openness, Productivity, and Collaboration; formerly "OLE for Process Control") standards today have been accepted as industrial standards for designing and developing industrial applications in manufacturing and process automation. However, the development of real industrial applications using the OPC standards at universities is limited due to the complexity and difficulty. In this paper, not only the current state of the OPC standards is provided, but also the current problems and how they can be managed and overcome are discussed. The general integration architecture based on the new OPC Unified Architecture (UA) specifications is then proposed and presented together with the initial results from the performed simulation. The potential areas of the proposed architecture and the redundancy strategies to increase the efficiency and reliability of the system are also introduced.