Industrial Communication Systems

57-1

57.1 Introduction

OPC Unied Architecture (OPC UA) is the new standard of the OPC Foundation [1] providing

interoperability (e.g., Microso DCOM technology is not used anymore) in process automation and

beyond. By dening abstract services, OPC UA provides a service-oriented architecture (SOA) for

industrial applications from factory-oor devices to enterprise applications. Since the rst introduc-

tion of OPC in 1996, OPC UA represents a tremendous achievement, which started at the end of

2003, that proposes to integrate the dierent avors of the former OPC specications (DA, HDA, DX,

XML-DA…) into a unied address space acc