A study on OPC specifications: Perspective and challenges

OPC (Openness, Productivity, and Collaboration) standards released by the OPC Foundation have provided a solution for system integration in recent years, especially in industrial automation and the enterprise systems that support industry. Because the OPC standards based in turn upon computer industry, they ensure standards technical reliability. The series of specifications contained in OPC standards defined the fundamental mechanisms and functionality of reading and writing process data, monitoring and processing events and alarms, and storing historical data. Many research and development works have proposed to apply them efficiently in the real situation. In this paper, we will not only give readers an overview of the OPC specifications but also try to indicate current situation and problem statement of OPC technology. Afterwards, the new OPC UA standard will be introduced as a good solution to manage and overcome these problems.