Interoperabilität von Plug-and-Work-fähigen OPC UA- und Cloud-basierten Smart Services

Smart Services in a cloud enable secure data and service integration in cross-site application scenarios as well as 'plug and work' functions for devices, machines, and data analytics software by applying the industrial standards Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture (OPC UA) and Automation Markup Language (AutomationML or AML for short). OPC UA serves as a comprehensive and secure communication technology from the machine level into the cloud, thus enabling manufacturer-independent interoperability. A Cloud Coupler on the shop floor publishes the availability of a factory and selected process data to a service implemented on the cloud infrastructure. Customers or even smart machines can use this information about e.g. Resources, availability and price, to make decisions for placing an order and can track their orders in real time. In order to simplify the setup of the connection to the cloud and minimize the commissioning time the cloud coupler also aggregates all OPC UA servers on devices in the factory into a single OPC UA aggregated server address space. In this paper an architecture is proposed which uses a cloud coupler and Plug and Work techniques to register a new or retrofit factory in a cloud to use and share information in an interoperable way. It is shown that the use of standards reduces the effort needed for the definition of interfaces and integration of devices and software.