An Evaluation of the Applicability of OPC UA Publish Subscribe on Factory Automation use Cases

In today's factory automation the exchange of data between systems becomes more and more important. The goal is to use one communication technology through all levels of a factory automation. Now the challenge is to find a communication technology that fulfills all the requirements on the different levels. The Server/Client architecture used in OPC UA became the de facto standard for several use cases in the upper levels, but in the lower levels e.g. Control-to-Control and Field level, OPC UA wasn't performant enough to replace today's fieldbus technologies. Therefore the OPC Foundation extended OPC UA by a Publish Subscribe architecture which was released in March 2018 in the OPC UA Specification Part 14. This paper gives an overview of this specification and an evaluation of the applicability of OPC UA communication technologies in combination with Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) on factory automation use cases.