OPC UA Integration with Cloud Service

The Internet of Things (IoT) is promising major operational benefits by closing the gap between production and IT. It presents an opportunity for the data we generate for manufacturing control to be shared with Internet-based applications to bring enterprise-wide advantage.

In automation, the benefits could include higher efficiencies, greater up times, faster repairs, and higher quality. More significant benefits could arise however if Industrial IoT can deliver fresh insights into how our plants work and enable us to operate them in better ways..

Industrial equipment, control systems, historians, enterprise applications and machines provide data output via various protocols. OPC UA client server framework enables exchange of such data through a standard protocol.

OPC UA is a platform-independent, open-communication protocol for industrial automation. It’s used in many industries, such as building automation, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, process control, oil and gas, and industrial robotics. Many types of devices, sensors, and aggregating servers provide an OPC UA server interface and access to data through this interface.

A Web Application is developed to configure OPC UA Client. Configurator will select and establish connection with OPC servers. OPC UA Client communicates with an on-premise OPC UA server, retrieves data from sensors and other sources, transferred to cloud through secure data transfer (SDF) using AMQP or MQTT protocols. Secure Data transfer is done over internet in every 10 seconds. Making use of data collected from various sources, we will do data analytics to bring a predictive analysis on maintenance to help reduce the production down time almost to zero.

The following diagram illustrates the OPC UA Client, OPC UA server, and the Cloud Service application.

Fig.1 Credit to The OPC Foundation,ORACLE IOT