Understanding OPC UA (2 Days)
Professional Training
A 2-day training course to master the design of relevant and interoperable information models with OPC UA.
Summary
This 2-day technical training module focuses on a deep dive into the OPC UA standard, its concepts, implementation, and practical application in industrial environments.
It explores the OPC UA ecosystem, its origins, foundation, state of the art, and evolution. It highlights the central role of OPC UA as an open standard and essential technology for industrial interoperability, security, and machine-to-machine (M2M) communication in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and Industry 4.0.
Participants will learn the fundamental concepts that differentiate OPC UA from its predecessor (OPC Classic), including its platform independence and object-oriented information model.
A comprehensive overview, accompanied by initial practical implementation, is provided.
Objectives
- Grasp the OPC UA ecosystem: protocol, security, commands, models, address space, architectures, and companion specs.
- Implement OPC UA client-server services.
- Apply semantic modeling in OPC UA.
- Understand OPC UA’s role in IIoT and industrial automation.
- Evaluate OPC UA protocols, security, and data encoding.
Target Audience
This training is aimed at Engineers, automation specialists, and programmers involved in implementing industrial systems:
- Project managers
- Automation engineers
- IT engineers
- Security engineers
- Developers
Program Overview
Day 1: OPC UA Fundamentals and Exploration
Theory
- General overview of OPC UA, its foundations, and its two pillars.
- Client/Server architecture, communication, and secure channels.
- Essential OPC UA commands: Read, Write, Browse, and Subscriptions.
- Information structuring: object-oriented approach and semantic modeling.
- Key concepts: DataValue, NodeId, Namespace, Variant, References
- Exploration of the OPC UA address space and its attributes.
Practical work
- Setting up a NodeOPCUA server and a JavaScript client.
- Connecting to a server, reading and writing data.
- Navigating and discovering an OPC UA tree.
Day 2: Advanced Services, Security, and Practical Implementation
Theory
- Detailed Subscriptions (MonitoredItems), Method calls, Alarms & Events.
- Data historization and extraction of calculated values (Aggregates).
- Publish/Subscribe (PubSub) model for D2D and MQTT communications.
- In-depth security: certificate management and Global Discovery Server.
- Companion specifications (DI, ADI, UAFx) and future evolutions of the standard.
Practical work
- Creating a simple server with NodeOPCUA and a JavaScript client.
- Illustration of use cases with NodeOPCUA, transferable to other OPC UA environments.