Issue

One of the biggest challenges in the industrial automation and control field is how to get machines to talk to each other. Exchanging data from machine to machine, or a machine to PC, machine integration between vendors of different types can be complex, laborious, and difficult, requiring expensive engineers and incurring significant expense. When you integrate systems of multiple vendors to provide total solutions to your customers, you want to use standardized, reliable, secure, scalable and platform independent technology.

Resolution

This is where we can leverage the OPC UA (Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture) to solve these strategic issues faced by most manufacturers. It is a standardized protocol that allows for seamless and secure communication between different systems and devices, regardless of the vendor or platform.

The document here describes one of the methods of exchanging data between different machines. By implementing OPC UA client function blocks in a controller, the controller can directly access data from any other OPC UA servers.

As an example, a demo architecture is shown:

A virtual machine or PC is used here as the OPC-UA server and the Modicon M580 ePAC as the OPC UA client, should be on the same network and should have the correct network settings configured. The virtual machine's network adapter should be set to bridged mode, and the virtual machine PC's firewall settings should allow communication with the M580 CPU (Firmware ≥ 4.10).

See attached document on how to implement the Modicon M580 OPC-UA Client Read/Write function blocks.