OPC UA

Microsoft introduced the OPC (OLE for Process Control) standard in 1996 to facilitate communication among Windows-based industrial automation applications. This initiative was closely followed by the establishment of the OPC Foundation, which played a pivotal role in overseeing the development and maintenance of the OPC standards. The release of OPC Classic specifications between 1996 and 2000 laid the groundwork for industrial communication, addressing the need for interoperability among diverse systems. 

As the early 2000s unfolded, the limitations of OPC Classic, such as its platform dependence and lack of robust security features, became apparent. This led to the initiation of OPC UA (Unified Architecture) development in 2003, with the OPC Foundation officially launching OPC UA in 2006. OPC UA was designed as a modern, platform-independent, and secure communication standard for industrial automation, marking a significant evolution from its predecessor. 

The protocol's development continued into the mid-2000s and beyond, with several milestones achieved over the years. In 2008, the OPC UA 1.0 specifications were released, introducing a more advanced and secure framework employing X.509 certificates for message signing and encryption, for industrial communication. Further enhancements came with the releases of OPC UA 1.02 and 1.03 between 2010 and 2012, and OPC UA 1.04 in 2015, which introduced robust encryption algorithms, expanded diagnostic capabilities and authentication methods, alongside comprehensive access controls to provide a fortified defence against the increasingly sophisticated landscape of cyber threats. In parallel, OPC UA's information modelling capabilities underwent significant refinement. These enhancements facilitated the representation of complex data structures, incorporation of rich metadata, and provision of tailored support for industry-specific information models. Such advancements enabled a more nuanced representation and interpretation of data across various industrial systems and applications, thereby enhancing operational efficiency and decision-making processes. 

OPC UA's significance was further highlighted in 2013 when it was adopted as a companion specification for Industry 4.0, emphasizing its crucial role in the context of smart manufacturing. Additionally, in 2016, OPC UA gained recognition from the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) as a key standard for industrial interoperability, underlining its importance in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) landscape. 

Continuing its trajectory of development and refinement, OPC UA expanded its capabilities in 2017-2018 to support emerging technologies such as cloud computing and edge computing. The year 2018 saw the introduction of the Pub/Sub communication model in OPC UA 1.04 Part 14, enabling high-performance, real-time data exchange and further solidifying OPC UA's position as a leading protocol for modern industrial communication. 

OPC UA, anchored by its Client/Server Profile, establishes the bedrock for effective communication within industrial systems, fostering dynamic data exchange and interaction. Through this architecture, clients connect with servers, facilitating seamless integration with underlying industrial frameworks. This foundation is complemented by the OPC UA Pub/Sub Profile, which introduces a publish-subscribe communication paradigm, enabling scalable and efficient data dissemination across extensive industrial networks. Essential to OPC UA's adaptability is its rich Information Model, proficient in representing diverse industrial data types like process data, alarms, and historical data. This model forms the cornerstone of OPC UA systems, ensuring robust data exchange and interoperability. 

OPC UA supports two primary communication models 

Client-Server Model: Clients, encompassing SCADA systems, HMI applications, or other software components, initiate communication with servers to execute operations such as reading data, writing data, browsing the server's address space, subscribing to data changes, and invoking methods on the server.  

The synergy between hardware and software components as follow underpins the seamless operation and efficiency of modern OPC UA based system: 

Hardware Components

Software Components

OPC UA offers a suite of technical advantages within diverse industrial operational environments as follows: 

Interoperability

Facilitated by its standardized communication framework. This framework ensures seamless data exchange across devices, systems, and applications from various vendors, transcending limitations imposed by differing hardware, operating systems, or communication protocols. 

Scalability

Its client-server model and distributed communication paradigm facilitate effortless system expansion and adaptation, catering to evolving operational demands. 

Reliability and Resilience

Includes built-in redundancy, connection monitoring, and error handling features. These attributes guarantee high availability and fault tolerance, crucial for minimizing downtime and maintaining continuous operations.  

Efficiency

Achieved via optimized protocols, compression techniques, and bandwidth management, which are essential for real-time monitoring and control applications. 

Rich Information Modelling

Representation of complex industrial data structures in a standardized and semantically meaningful manner. 

Security

OPC UA enhances industrial security through encryption, authentication, access control, and secure communication, leveraging digital certificates, robust certificate management, and a secure-by-design approach to protect data integrity, confidentiality, and mitigate cyber threats. 

OPC UA is a central protocol in the field of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) that enables seamless and secure data exchange between different industrial systems and devices. OPC UA is platform-independent and highly scalable, supporting interoperability between a wide range of devices, from sensors and actuators to complex robotic systems. This makes it an invaluable asset in realizing the integrated and intelligent environments envisioned by IIoT and Industry 4.0. 

A key feature of OPC UA is its ability to provide both real-time and historical data, enabling comprehensive monitoring and control of industrial processes. OPC UA supports complex data structures, information modelling and event handling, and provides rich contextual information that improves decision-making processes. The robust security mechanisms, including encryption, authentication and audit trails, ensure that sensitive industrial data remains protected from cyber threats, which is critical in networked environments. 

Moreover, OPC UA's service-oriented architecture allows it to interface with various other industrial protocols and technologies seamlessly, acting as a bridge that unifies disparate systems. This capability is particularly beneficial in legacy industrial setups, enabling the integration of older equipment with new IIoT technologies without extensive overhauls. 

In a typical IIoT scenario, OPC UA can be used to connect edge devices to cloud platforms, facilitating advanced analytics, machine learning, and predictive maintenance. For instance, real-time data from sensors can be collected and transmitted via OPC UA to cloud-based systems for analysis, enabling proactive maintenance schedules that reduce downtime and enhance operational efficiency. 

In essence, OPC UA's flexible, secure, and interoperable nature makes it a cornerstone for implementing IIoT solutions, driving smarter, more efficient industrial processes. By bridging the gap between traditional manufacturing and modern digitalization, OPC UA helps industries unlock new levels of automation and intelligence. 

With its netFIELD ecosystem, Hilscher offers a holistic infrastructure to integrate IIoT capability into the field level, generate a multitude of previously unused data, process it at the network edge or in application-specific IIoT applications from the cloud and draw value-generating conclusions from it. 

Intelligent netFIELD Edge devices act as data intermediaries between the automation level and the information technology. They aggregate, process and transmit additional IoT information from the production process completely autonomously - either locally or in combination with a cloud. The secure netFIELD OS operating system and freely reloadable software modules in the form of Docker containers determine the intelligence of the gateways. Both the devices themselves and the software containers can be managed remotely via an internet portal. This enables the centralized and cost-efficient installation, maintenance and monitoring of customized IIoT edge solutions worldwide. Hilscher's edge gateway portfolio includes devices with different function sets and in different performance levels - for running compute-intensive applications, for direct integration into industrial networks as field devices or as an additional function integrated into an IO-Link master. 

With the netFIELD Cloud, Hilscher's centralized edge management system, users can remotely manage and monitor large fleets of edge gateways and industrial PCs and deploy containerized edge software to the devices. This is an essential function without which the management of countless devices would not be economically feasible. This is because operating the gateways, their operating system and the applications running on them requires regular maintenance, for example for software updates. Based on Hilscher's many years of OT expertise, the netFIELD Cloud can be used without any development effort and is open to any digitalization project thanks to its container technology. As an expert in industrial communication, Hilscher already offers turnkey software applications focusing on communication tasks - from platform connectors for public clouds such as AWS or Azure to local applications such as an OPC UA to MQTT converter and monitoring applications. 

With the loadable firmware IOTLFW V2 for its netX-based communication interfaces, Hilscher also enables the quick and easy expansion of Real-Time Ethernet interfaces with IoT functions. This means that they can simultaneously act as an OPC UA server or MQTT client and represent the specific data model of the device. This simplifies a range of practical use cases, from asset management to condition monitoring and predictive maintenance.