Aggregoivan OPC UA palvelimen käyttö etäyhteydessä maatalouden työkoneisiin

摘要

Agricultural machinery has improved rapidly during the last decades and the role of electronic controllers and sensors has increased. Simultaneously and partially because of this, the efficiency requirements concerning farming have grown more stringent. Information systems to help in farm management are already commonplace. Many work machines utilize the ISO 11783 communication protocol, through which a lot of data from the operation and internal state of a machine could be retrieved. However, this available data from agricultural work machines is not fully utilized. This thesis evaluates OPC UA aggregating servers as a centralized means to read and store the data available from multiple work machines.This thesis builds on an earlier thesis where an OPC UA information model was developed for agricultural work machines utilizing the ISO 11783 communication protocol. First, a literature review was done to get a general view of the current state and the intended future of farm management systems, and to see how and where the data from the work machines can be utilized. Based on this and the previous work, the requirements for an aggregating server concentrating the information available from work machines running OPC UA servers were defined. A prototype aggregating server that is able to automatically transform the information from multiple ISO 11783 work machines to a unified view using a set of mapping rules was designed and implemented.OPC UA aggregating servers were found to be viable technology for the centralized data monitoring and collection of ISO 11783 work machines. All relevant data exposed by the work machine OPC UA servers can also be accessed through the aggregating server. The mapping engine implemented on the aggregating server prototype can be extended to automatically map the information from other devices exposing themselves through OPC UA as well. The usefulness of an aggregating server increases if in the future OPC UA will be more commonly adopted and utilized by other agricultural equipment as well.