Behind the façade

OPC UA (IEC 62541) has proven to be a very rich and versatile technology, not least of which we find with the release of the Field Device Integration standard, FDI, in 2014 [16]. However, when introducing such a standard within products or systems on a broad scale, also economic questions on development effort and footprint must be answered. Ideally, we wish technology to be versatile, time-efficient to implement, and cost-efficient to deploy.