Towards an efficient discovery services in OPC unified architecture

Abstract

The OPC Unified Architecture, simply abbreviated to OPC UA, is the new generation of well-known and globally successful OPC standards. The OPC UA has totally thirteen parts which comprise specifications to ensure high performance communication, independent platform, and unified data model in enterprise systems. Discovery part, one of OPC UA parts, specifies a set of discovery services by which OPC UA Client perform discovery process to obtain information about OPC UA servers, including endpoint and security information. Unfortunately, the key part is still being developed, which leads to the limitation in development of OPC UA components. In this paper, we not only enrich the discovery concept by using WS-Discovery and extend it for global discovery case but also give readers an approach of how to implement discovery services in practice. The implementation will be deployed on Microsoft WCF Framework. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.