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Communication
152
Function Manual, 05/2021, A5E03735815-AJ
OPC UA communication
9
9.1 What you need to know about OPC UA
9.1.1 OPC UA and Industrie 4.0
Uniform standard for information and data exchange
Industry 4.0 stands for the intensive utilization, evaluation and analysis of the large volumes
of data from production in IT systems at the enterprise level. With Industry 4.0, data
exchange between the production and enterprise levels is rapidly increasing. However, a
prerequisite for success is a uniform standard for the information and data exchange.
Classic OPC only runs on Windows operating systems. To get around this restriction, the OPC
Foundation developed the OPC UA (OPC Unified Architecture) standard.
The OPC UA standard is particularly suitable for data exchange across different levels thanks
to its independence from specific operating systems, its secure transfer procedures and the
semantic description of data. Machine data (controlled variables, measured values or
parameters) can also be transferred in this way.
An important component of this concept is that OPC UA communication can take place in
parallel with real-time communication for time-critical, machine-level data transfer.
OPC UA is highly scalable so that a consistent information exchange between sensors,
controllers and MES or ERP systems is possible.
OPC UA makes available not only data but also information about the data (data types), at the
same time making possible machine-interpretable access to the data.
OPC UA topic page
For an overview of the most important articles and links on the subject of OPC UA, refer to
the SIEMENS Industry Online Support.
OPC UA topic page (
https://support.industry.siemens.com/cs/ww/en/view/109770435 )