OPC UA & Industrie 4.0 - enabling technology with high diversity and variability

Industrie 4.0 demands flexibility, adaptability, transparency and much more requirements which have to be fulfilled by Industrie 4.0 components or systems in order to achieve horizontal and vertical interoperability as well as interoperability over the lifecycle. The present paper describes different scenarios and deployed use cases, which are all based on the OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA), to state the role of OPC UA as enabling technology for flexible, adaptive, and transparent production. Nevertheless, the scenarios, based on different methods, architectural approaches, hardware and software, are located in different application domains, and cover different parts of the OPC UA standard series. The goals range from quality defect tracking, to monitoring and control, or code analysis.