OPC UA in practical applications

OPC UA (IEC 62541) is a rich and versatile technology – especially since the release of the Field Device Integration standard in 2014. However, when implementing such a standard on a broad scale, economic issues concerning development effort and footprint must also be considered. Ideally, technology should be versatile, time-efficient to implement, and cost-efficient to deploy. In this paper, we present our experience over the past five years of implementing OPC UA clients, servers, and gateways in various automation domains. As part of research prototyping, the reduction of development effort was a general priority. We find that the OPC UA technology offers both low implementation effort and low resource demands in servers. In particular, this makes it suitable for embedded applications, and overall it offers an ideal base technology for Internet of Things applications.