An OPC UA server as a gateway that shares CAN network data and engineering knowledge

In order to connect existing electronic devices that are equipped with fieldbus communication capabilities into the emerging Cyber Physical Systems (CPS), new models that combine live data from the underlying devices together with the metadata information that describes them have to be created. The new solutions should be based on widely accepted communication standards and should be easy to implement even in the case of limited resources. The presented work focuses on an OPC UA server that is used as a gateway to share the information that is available in a Control Area Network (CAN). It joins the live data from physical devices with the meta information that supports their proper understanding. The engineering knowledge is taken directly from the CANoe framework that is used to develop CAN-based systems. The information is available to any OPC UA client according to the OPC UA data model. The focus of this paper is on a flexible model to present the data and meta information from the underlying physical systems. The proposed solution is based on the object-oriented based communication model that is supported by the OPC UA standard. The above-mentioned idea is illustrated by a simple use case of a CAN-based application from the automotive industry.