OPC Book – Introduction
Introduction from Dr. Reinhold Achatz, Vice President OPC Foundation and Corporate Vice President Siemens
For over 10 years, the OPC Foundation has offered a very successful interface between control system and control level. Interoperability was an important feature from the very beginning. The concept supports the transfer of information not only between the different levels of the enterprise, but also between components and devices of different vendors, and in the manufacturing and process industry.
With OPC Unified Architecture (UA), the scope of the interface description has been extended to wide parts of the enterprise. The paradigm of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) is embraced by this new interface description. This allows communication from field level up to the Manufacturing Execution Level (MES) in all industries. Platform neutrality is another important feature of the new UA interface description. Scalability, reliability and a rich set of services are additional great features.
The author of this book, Jürgen Lange, has been a permanent contributor to the OPC interface definition. Jürgen was able to convince key players of the OPC Foundation to contribute to this book. His books are always an excellent way to understand the implementation of OPC. This statement is also valid for the new version of this book.
Dr. Reinhold Achatz
Vice President OPC Foundation
Corporate Vice President Siemens
Introduction from Jim Luth, OPC Foundation Technical Director
I am very pleased to give you an introduction here to this important OPC book. OPC has been in the business of developing and delivering specifications and technology that allow our vendors to successfully build interoperable products in a multiplatform environment. This book provides a solid foundation of knowledge for suppliers and end users alike to truly understand OPC from the beginning all the way through the OPC Unified Architecture.
The OPC Unified Architecture provides a complete service-oriented architecture integrating all the functionality from the existing OPC COM based specifications into a single architecture, as well as providing additional functionality and services to provide a complete scalable architecture for secure reliable interoperability. OPC UA was architected, designed and developed by over 30 dedicated engineers from 20+ different companies that are competitors in industrial automation. The focus was to build a complete infrastructure for multiplatform interoperability that allows vendors and consortiums to easily publish their respective information models for generic access. The series of specifications that were developed as part of this multivendor effort was designed to solve very complex problems and be easily adopted by vendors according to the functionality of their respective products. OPC's scalable architecture defined by profiles allows existing OPC products to be easily adapted and modified to support advanced functionality of OPC UA, inclusive of providing a transport mechanism that allows for information exchange across corporate firewalls.
OPC COM Data Access was designed by vendors to solve a problem of moving data from the factory floor to the first-tier visualization applications. OPC UA was designed by vendors and end-users to solve integration problems facilitating data and information being exchanged from embedded devices all the way through complex applications in the enterprise domain. This book allows you the opportunity to understand where OPC came from, and what the OPC Unified Architecture can do for you.
The importance of vendors providing toolkits to enable other vendors to easily deliver products that support the OPC technology cannot be underestimated. The author of this book has been a visionary in interoperability for many years, and their company provides a cool cat that truly enables vendors to easily build and deliver product's for a variety of markets including embedded all the way through the desktop.
I encourage you to read this book, and use it as a reference to understanding the technology of OPC.
I wish to thank the authors for putting together such a solid foundation of knowledge to enable our end users and suppliers to understand the value proposition of the OPC technology, and to help provide a good overview for companies to build and use products supporting existing OPC and OPC UA.
Jim Luth, Technical Director OPC Foundation