REST based OPC UA for the IIoT

Abstract

Ope UA is one of the most important communication protocols for Industry 4.0 applications in the automation domain. However, to really reach the status of an Internet-of-Things protocol, OPC UA also has to give some answers to upcoming cross-domain questions. Only if OPC UA is able to bridge the gap between several different domains, it will be accepted as real Internet-of-Things protocol and therefore supported even better by the APIs of the big IT players. One technology which already interconnects nearly every domain is the REST architecture. A lot of research already focused on the combination of these two technologies. However, in this paper we will show the first approach which covers all OPC UA requirements and therefore enables also use cases like server reconfiguration. We will also give some insights into our concept, which was contributed to the OPC UA specification as part of the Vl.04 release.