OPC UA Discovery: A Study of Challenges and Perspective

摘要

In the OPC Unified Architecture specification, Discovery is the important part which contains the solution for finding OPC UA Servers in enterprise system. Finding target is considered as the first step of communication. Even though OPC UA Servers (UA Servers) provide extensive functionalities and data, it is largely ineffective if the UA Servers cannot be discovered for later use. This paper aims at leveraging OPC Discovery concept, has been being developed by OPC Foundation, by using WS-Discovery to overcome main challenges: (i) Discovery process is still static and need improving, (ii) embedded OPC UA devices become more and more popular, discovery mechanism need extending for them, and (iii) discovery process is being tied in one domain, it needs extending for cross-domain case as well.