OPC UA server aggregation — The foundation for an internet of portals

Devices in industrial automation systems are becoming more and more intelligent. Consequently, functions such as server services are migrating into the device level. To solve the resulting connection mesh, this paper entails the concept of aggregation of servers connected to devices in an industrial automation scenario. The first section discusses the basic requirements for aggregation and proposes an architecture for server aggregation as a solution. The following section describes the building blocks of the architecture. Finally, the paper presents a prototype based on this architecture model as a proof of concept implementation of the concept introduced in this paper. The last section discusses the results of the prototyping phase including the possible improvements of the same.