A Compliance Testing Structure for Implementation of Industry Standards through OPC UA

Information exchange across different departments in factories must be structured and verified for effective production processes. However, any such exchange across networks to clients must be compliant to company standards so that uniformity and security in data dispensation is maintained. Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture (OPC UA) solutions provide users with the flexibility of discharging information through network based protocols. This paper aims to build a compliance testing methodology for external vendors of an organisation who are interconnected with the OPC UA Server-Client Protocols. The structure is built on a host of UA clients that test UA specifications and information models from these vendors. This enables an organisational entity, for example, a manufacturer, to provide its clients, in this case external vendors such as suppliers, with the flexibility of conforming to prescribed standards in a testing phase on an automated digital platform rather than with older methods such as data transfer though databases or documents. An implementation of this approach is presented using example servers created for this purpose. It follows that external vendors can perform compliance testing and possibly improve their standards to match the company standards through remote testing after proper authentication measures provided by OPC UA.