Abstract
The Open Platform Communication Unified Architecture (OPC UA) protocol is a key enabler of Industry 4.0 and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). OPC UA is already accepted by the industry and its presence is expected to reach more and more fields, applications, and hierarchical levels. Advances within the latest specifications are providing the opportunity to extend the capabilities and the applicability of the protocol, targeting better performances in terms of data volumes, speed, availability, footprint, and security. Continuing previous researches focusing on the publish–subscribe (pub/sub) mechanism and real-time constraints, the current study aims to consider higher data-volumes, approach the multi-channel User Datagram Protocol (UDP)-based communication, and analyze the robustness of the developed mechanism in the context of long-term data transmission. Consequently, the research proposes to extend the applicability of the OPC UA in the context of image transmission. Although highly needed, the image transmission after processing is currently beyond the reach of OPC UA or other legacy industrial protocols, being considered as a separate fraction in the industrial environment. The concept and developments are applied considering both the end-of-line industrial manufacturing process in the automotive sector and the car-to-infrastructure communication. Without special hardware constraints, the obtained results are proven to be appreciable, opening various future perspectives for image transmission using OPC UA.
Highlights
The manufacturing industry is continuously evolving towards a complete Industry 4.0 perspective
For a primary analysis regarding the usage of the Open Platform Communication Unified Architecture (OPC UA) publish–subscribe mechanism in the context of image processing, the chosen use case was the object detection and transmission from a publisher of messages, based on the presence of objects of interest, to a subscriber located on a different device
OPC UA publish–subscribe is to utilize the time-sensitive networking (TSN) extension of the Ethernet to obtain realtime guarantees for all the specific pub/sub processes and achieve a deterministic behavior regarding the transport of DataSetMessages
Summary
The manufacturing industry is continuously evolving towards a complete Industry 4.0 perspective. The practical industrial development is always slowed down by legacy equipment, solutions, and procedures, but at the same time, it is always pushed forward by necessities-based, quickly developed new entities and services that, at least for the short-term, are fulfilling the needs for evolution. These new entities and services are not always the best or complete options and often are not seeing the big picture in terms of research status.
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