From Requirement Specification to OPC UA Information Model Design: A Product Assembly Line Monitoring Case Study

Abstract

Open Platform Communication Unified Architecture (OPC UA) has emerged as a highly-demanded standard in building industrial systems. One factor in this success is the concepts of OPC UA address space and OPC UA information model. OPC UA address space provides a mechanism to represent the resources of an OPC UA server and its field devices as OPC UA nodes. OPC UA information model structures OPC UA nodes as a schema. Once other devices and systems understand the schema, they can interact appropriately with the industrial system. Thus, designing the OPC UA information model is an undeniable and essential practice of OPC UA-based industrial system engineering. However, both academia and industry suffer from a lack of shared experiences on this subject. This gap motivated us to share our experiences on the development of an OPC UA information model. These experiences are based on an actual product assembly line monitoring case study developed at CEA LIST. Overall, in this paper, we aim to throw some light on the steps involved in the transformation of a requirement specification into an OPC UA information model.