Integrating A Dynamic Simulator and Advanced Process Control using the OPC-UA Standard

摘要

Insufficient interoperability has long been an issue on the factory floor, however, new technologies and standards are enabling production systems to become more agile and interoperable. A communication standard can, for example, make interoperation among different vendor-specific software and hardware tools in production systems easier and more reliable. In this paper, we share our research results and experience for the establishment of a connection between a dynamic simulator and an advanced process controller in a manufacturing system using OPC-UA. The OPC-UA communication protocol, which is middleware, acts as a common interface between these systems. We established the client and server for communication and defined an exchange data structure based on the OPC-UA standard for a control problem in a chemical process plant. The case study is a proof of concept of the OPC-UA standard implementation to support interoperability for different domains.