Supervisory control and real-time constraints

OPC (OLE for Process Control) protocol was developed as a solution which fulfills requirements of open data integration architecture for industrial control. OPC standard is not primarily intended for feedback control or communication with high-bandwidth hard real-time requirements. Adding OPC to a process could influence the dynamics of the control loop and could cause problems in controller design and implementation. The experiments presented in this paper have shown that OPC if properly configured, is capable of providing a loop time shorter than the time constants of many industrial processes.