Introduction to OPC UA performance

Abstract

Applications operating in the control layer of the industrial computer systems are designed not only to perform real-time data exchange between each other, but also to transfer some information to higher levels (SCADA, MES, ERP). OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA) is an example of a standard that handles this type of communication. It is not a real-time protocol, but is designed rather to gather information about the transferred data with the occurrence time stamp and distribute that information on demand. Nevertheless, it is crucial to be able to estimate the performance of data transfer in this client-server model based protocol. For now, there is no documented research on the impact of number of clients and amount of transferred data on server's performance. The goal of this article is to find and describe the parameters of the OPC Unified Architecture protocol that are the most important for the system's performance. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.