Standalone OPC UA Wrapper for Industrial Monitoring and Control Systems

Abstract

OPC unified architecture (UA), a communication standard for the manufacturing industry, enables exchanging control and management data among distributed entities in industrial automation systems. OPC UA wrapper is a migration strategy that provides UA clients with seamless access to legacy servers having OPC classic interfaces. This paper presents the design of a standalone OPC UA wrapper and discusses its performance through extensive experiments using a prototype implementation. The wrapper consists of two main components, i.e., UA server and classic client, which communicate with each other via shared memory and semaphore. One important feature of the design is that it employs a distributed component object model runtime library implemented in Java for platform independence. This makes it possible to build a cost-competitive wrapper system by using commercial off-the-shelf non-Windows solutions with low-cost microprocessors. Another key feature is the event-driven update interface between the UA and classic components, which we propose as an alternative to the sampling-based mechanism for the reduced delay. Through experiments using workloads from an industrial monitoring system, we present a systematic approach of identifying the system parameters having a direct impact on the wrapper performance and eventually tuning them such that the read and subscription services of OPC UA exhibit the best performance.