A Survey on OPC UA Protocol: Overview, Challenges and Opportunities

Industrial communication plays a crucial role in modern automation by enabling control, monitoring, quality assessment, maintenance, and integration of management systems in production and manufacturing processes. OPC UA has emerged as one of the most widely utilized protocols in recent years, as evidenced by its growing number of applications, and is considered to be one of the most promising protocols for the future. Given its significance, this work aims to provide an overview that characterizes the current state of the protocol. To accomplish this, a systematic review of 238 relevant studies was conducted to extract relevant data. The results obtained provide an up-to-date overview of the field, as well as identify several potential research directions, challenges, and opportunities for further research on OPC UA.