OPC UA for plug & produce: Automatic device discovery using LDS-ME

Current manufacturing and production are changing more and more into a flexible and adaptable factory layout that requires rapid changeover and short reconfiguration times of machines. Additionally the setup time for new devices should be as short as possible. In this paper we propose a hierarchical architecture for a multi-level Plug & Produce system and evaluate the proposed structure using open source OPC UA implementations for easy integration of new devices into an existing system. Aside from the requirements for such a system, basic concepts of the OPC UA Discovery Service Set are described and different open source OPC UA implementations for C/C++ and Java are compared.