OPC UA

OPC UA

OPC stands for "Open Platform Communication" and it is a set of standards for communication between industrial control systems and software applications. It is used to provide real-time data access and control of industrial processes and enables different software applications to interact with a variety of industrial devices and protocols. OPC is widely used in industries such as manufacturing, oil, gas, and power generation to connect control systems and software applications for improved efficiency and automation.

If a PLC has an OPC UA server software installed it is possible to connect directly to the OPC UA server using an OPC UA client without the need for any other middleware OPC server software to be installed.

OPC UA enables direct connection with a PLC without any middleware. For PLCs that do not have built-in OPC UA support, it is of course possible to connect the PLC to a compliant OPC UA server software like KepServerEx.

RS Production has a built-in OPC UA client.

OPC UA and RS Production

No need to open ports for incoming data

All data traffic to the RS Production cloud service is initiated from the local clients.

There is never any traffic that is initiated from the RS Production Service on the Azure cloud.

All traffic is encrypted with https and is on port 443. Read more about the secure data traffic on the Network system overview page.

Principles for OPC-data to RS Production

Incremental counters for cycles, produced and scrapped amounts

OPC update rate is about 0.1 seconds (and can be set to your needs), which is slow in a real time context. To avoid missing cycles and pulses, RS Production uses an increasing counter. If you want it is possible to set a reset point where the counter restarts at 0.

Exemple with a reset point at 9 999

Uptime/downtime

RS Production reads operating signals (uptime/downtime) every second.

Every reading cycle, RS Production reads (samples) the current value of a specified field. This means that the system does not log any information about the exact time (in milliseconds) since the field changed.

Coding of loss reasons and station codes

RS Production can automatically capture and categorize stops with both reason code and station code.

Each reason code and station code needs a specific OPC field that reflects its status.

Machine alarm signals

RS Production can capture machine alarms and store them in a table available in Office tools.

Machine alarms in RS Production has one of two possible statuses in the table to the right.

Each alarm needs to have its own OPC-field and RS Production timestamps the status changes.