But all wasn’t well with OPC, or OPC Classic as I now call it. Security issues, dependency on Microsoft platforms, expensive and inefficient ways to move data, on top of maintenance difficulties, all plagued OPC Classic.
So, even though OPC Classic has been wildly successful and worked well when managed right, there was enough dissatisfaction with its issues that a successor was planned for it.
What is OPC UA?
That is a very simple question. The answer when you are discussing a complex technology like OPC UA isn’t as simple.
OPC UA is the next generation of OPC technology. OPC UA is a more secure, open, reliable mechanism for transferring information between servers and clients. It provides more open transports, better security and a more complete information model than the original OPC, “OPC Classic.” OPC UA provides a very flexible and adaptable mechanism for moving data between enterprise-type systems and the kinds of controls, monitoring devices and sensors that interact with real world data.
Why a totally new communication architecture? OPC Classic is limited and not well suited for today’s requirements to move data between enterprise/Internet systems and the systems that control real processes that generate and monitor live data. These limitations include:
- Platform dependence on Microsoft – OPC Classic is built around DCOM (Distribution COM), an older communication technology that is being de-emphasized by Microsoft
- Insufficient data models – OPC Classic lacks the ability to adequately represent the kinds of data, information and relationships between data items and systems that are important in today’s connected world
- Inadequate security – Microsoft and DCOM are perceived by many users to lack the kind of security needed in a connected world with sophisticated threats from viruses and malware.
OPC UA is the first communication technology built specifically to live in that “no man’s land” where data must traverse firewalls, specialized platforms and security barriers to arrive at a place where that data can be turned into information. OPC UA is designed to connect databases, analytic tools, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems and other enterprise systems with real-world data from low-end controllers, sensors, actuators and monitoring devices that interact with real processes that control and generate real-world data.
OPC UA uses scalable platforms, multiple security models, multiple transport layers and a sophisticated information model to allow the smallest dedicated controller to freely interact with complex, high-end server applications. OPC UA can communicate anything from simple downtime status to massive amounts of highly complex plant-wide information.
OPC UA is a sophisticated, scalable and flexible mechanism for establishing secure connections between clients and servers. Features of this unique technology include:
Scalability –OPC UA is scalable and platform independent. It can be supported on high-end servers and on low-end sensors. OPC UA uses discoverable profiles to include tiny embedded platforms as servers in an OPC UA system.
A Flexible Address Space – The OPC UA address space is organized around the concept of an object. Objects are entities that consist of variables and methods and provide a standard way for servers to transfer information to clients.
Common Transports and Encodings – OPC UA uses standard transports and encodings to ensure that connectivity can be easily achieved in both the embedded and enterprise environments.
Security – OPC UA implements a sophisticated security model that ensures the authentication of clients and servers, the authentication of users and the integrity of their communication.
Internet Capability –OPC UA is fully capable of moving data over the Internet.
A Robust Set of Services –OPC UA provides a full suite of services for eventing, alarming, reading, writing, discovery and more.
Certified Interoperability –OPC UA certifies profiles such that connectivity between a client and server using a defined profile can be guaranteed.
A Sophisticated Information Model – OPC UA profiles more than just an object model. OPC UA is designed to connect objects in such a way that true information can be shared between clients and servers.
Sophisticated Alarming and Event Management –OPC UA provides a highly configurable mechanism for providing alarms and event notifications to interested clients. The alarming and event mechanisms go well beyond the standard change-in-value type alarming found in most protocols.
Integration with Standard Industry-Specific Data Models – The OPC Foundation is working with a number of industry trade groups to define specific information models for their industries and to support those information models within OPC UA.
How OPC UA Differs from Plant Floor Systems
I’ve studied this technology for a long time now. And yet there is a question that I almost shrink from. In fact, I sometimes hate to answer it.
It’s not because I don’t understand what it is. It’s not that I don’t understand how it works. And it’s not that I don’t believe that it is a very valuable tool to almost every plant floor system.
It’s just hard to put it into context when there isn’t anything to compare it to. For example, when Profinet IO came out, I could tell people that it was the equivalent of EtherNet/IP for Siemens Controllers. Same kind of technology. Basically the same kind of functionality. Easy to explain.
But how do I explain OPC UA when it doesn’t have an equivalent? You could say that it is Web services for automation systems. Or that it’s SOA for automation systems, an even more arcane term. SOA is “Service Oriented Architecture,” basically the same thing as Web services. That’s fine if you’re an IT guy (or gal) and you understand those terms. You have some context.
But if you’re a plant floor guy, it’s likely that even though you use Web services (it the plumbing for the Internet) you don’t know what that term means.
So the reason I get skittish about answering this question is that they always follow up with another question that makes me cringe: “Why do we need another protocol? Modbus TCP, EtherNet/IP and Profinet IO work just fine.”
So I have to start with the fact that it’s not like EtherNet/IP, Profinet IO or Modbus TCP. It’s a completely new paradigm for plant floor communications. It’s like trying to explain EtherNet/IP to a PLC programmer in 1982. With nothing to compare it to, it’s impossible to understand.
That’s where I am trying to explain OPC UA.
The people I’m trying to reach have lived with the PLC networking paradigm for so long that it’s second nature. You have a PLC, it is a master kind of device and it moves data in and out of slave devices. It uses really simple, transaction-type messaging or some kind of connected messaging.
In either case, there is this buffer of output data in a thing called a programmable controller. There is a buffer of input data in a bunch of devices called servers, slaves or nodes. The buffer of input data moves to the programmable controller. The output data buffers move from the programmable controller to the devices. Repeat. Forever. Done.
That’s really easy to wrap your mind around. Really easy to see how it fits into your manufacturing environment and really easy to architect.
OPC UA lives outside that paradigm. Well, really, that’s not true. OPC UA lives in parallel with that paradigm. It doesn’t replace it. It extends it. Adds on to it. Brings it new functionality and creates new use cases and drives new applications. In the end, it increases productivity, enhances quality and lowers costs by providing not only more data, but also information, and the right kind of information to the production, maintenance, and IT systems that need that information when they need it.
Pretty powerful, huh?
Our current mechanisms for moving plant floor data – few or no systems move information – is brittle. It takes massive amounts of human and computing resources to get anything done. And in the process we lose lots of important meta-data, we lose resolution and we create fragile systems that are nightmares to support.
And don’t even ask about the security holes they create. Because when there are problems, and there always are, the first thing everyone does is to remove the security and reboot.
These systems are a fragile house of cards. They need to be knocked down.
And because of all this, opportunities to mine the factory floor for quality data, interrogate and build databases of maintenance data, feed dashboard-reporting systems, gather historical data and feed enterprise analytic systems are lost. Opportunities to improve maintenance procedures, reduce downtime, compare performance at various plants, lines and cells across the enterprise are all lost.
This is the gap that OPC UA fills. It’s not something Profinet IO can do, even though the devoted acolytes would contest that statement. It’s not something that EtherNet/IP can do. And it’d be a joke to talk about Modbus TCP in this context.
So I’m back to the original question: “What exactly is OPC UA”?
OPC UA is about reliably, securely and most of all, easily, modeling “objects” and making those objects available around the plant floor, to enterprise applications and throughout the corporation. The idea behind it is infinitely broader than anything most of us have ever thought about before.
It all starts with an object. An object that could be as simple as a single piece of data or as sophisticated as a process, a system or an entire plant.
It might be a combination of data values, meta-data and relationships. Take a dual loop controller. The dual loop controller object would relate variables for the setpoints and actual values for each loop. Those variables would reference other variables that contain meta-data like the temperature units, high and low setpoints and text descriptions. The object might also make available subscriptions to get notifications on changes to the data values or the meta-data for that data value. A client accessing that one object can get as little data as it wants (single data value) or an extremely rich set of information that describes that controller and its operation in great detail.
OPC UA is, like its factory floor cousins, composed of a client and a server. The client device requests information. The server device provides it. But as we can see from the loop controller example, what the OPC UA server does is much more sophisticated than what an EtherNet/IP, Modbus TCP or Profinet IO server does.
An OPC UA server models data, information, processes and systems as objects and presents those objects to clients in ways that are useful to vastly different types of client applications. Better yet, the OPC UA server provides sophisticated services that the client can use, including:
Discovery Services – Services that clients can use to know what objects are available, how they are linked to other objects, what kind of data and what type is available, and what meta-data is available that can be used to organize, classify and describe those objects and values
Subscription Services – Services that the clients can use to identify what kind of data is available for notifications. Services that clients can use to decide how little, how much and when they wish to be notified about changes, not only to data values but to the meta-data and structure of objects
Query Services – Services that deliver bulk data to a client, like historical data for a data value
Node Services – Services that clients can use to create, delete and modify the structure of the data maintained by the server
Method Services – Services that the clients can use to make function calls associated with objects
Unlike the standard industrial protocols, an OPC UA server is a data engine that gathers information and presents it in ways that are useful to various types of OPC UA client devices, devices that could be located on the factory floor like an HMI, a proprietary control program like a recipe manager, or a database, dashboard or sophisticated analytics program that might be located on an enterprise server.
Even more interesting, this data is not necessarily limited to a single physical node. Objects can reference other objects, data variables, data types and more that exist in nodes off someplace else in the subnet or someplace else in the architecture or even someplace else on the Internet.
OPC UA organizes processes, systems, data and information in a way that is absolutely unique to the experience of the industrial automation industry. It is a unique tool that attacks a completely different problem than that solved by the EtherNet/IP, Modbus TCP and Profinet IO Ethernet protocols. OPC UA is an information-modeling and delivery tool that provides access to that information to clients throughout the enterprise.
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