Practical Implementation of an OPC UA Multi-Server Aggregation and Management Architecture for IIoT

The Open Platform Communication Unified Architecture (OPC UA) is a platform-independent service-oriented architecture, it has been widely used in industrial field network communication for its open, cross-platform, security, and extensible information model characteristics. The OPC UA supports clients/server (C/S) and publisher/subscriber (Pub/Sub) communication modes, using the Pub/Sub mode with the Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) technology can greatly improve the real-time capability of the OPC UA. In factory field automation communication systems, various OPC UA servers are embedded in controllers, sensors, and actuators to enable the reliable exchange of information among each system with different data streams (i.e., real-time and non-real-time). It is hard to configure and manage such a large number of heterogeneous OPC UA servers. In this work, we propose an OPC UA multi-server aggregation and management architecture for industrial field networks, which supports the automatic discovery and aggregate of OPC UA servers, and a centralized configuration management method for OPC UA communication data streams is also supported. A laboratory-level OPC UA multi-server aggregation management platform is implemented to validate the proposed architecture. The test results demonstrate that the platform can support centralized management and configuration of multiple OPC UA servers and their corresponding data streams through a uniform OPC UA interface.