Industrial data-collector by enabling OPC-UA standard for Industry 4.0

Abstract

Industrial Communication Systems have become an increasingly essential part of factory automation, motion control, networked control systems. New and real-time capable solutions are required to support the always more present Industry 4.0 paradigm: for both local and wide area networks. At the same time, standardization has also started moving in this direction: in particular, for future open and dynamic system architectures, promising activities based on OPC-UA are serious attempt to satisfy stricter requirements for interoperability and information modeling with hard real-time needs. For these reasons, in this paper the development of an OPC-UA based architecture is described: the main target is to build a “collector” able to collect data from the shop-floor and convert them in the OPC-UA standard for an agile and effective vertical integration. The subsequent analysis carried out on the testbed mainly focuses on the performance evaluation of the method. To achieve high-performance data transmission in a fair environment, a parallel communication mechanism has been proposed.