OPC Express Interface (Xi)

What is OPC Xi?

OPC Xi is the newest technology added to the OPC Foundation technology portfolio complementing OPC Unified Architecture (UA) and COM-based OPC Classic technologies.

The OPC Xi interface is the result of collaboration among several OPC vendor companies from the process industry to develop an easily integrated and secure solution for a variety of plant communications. OPC Xi's primary objective was to provide a .NET-based migration path from OPC Classic. Additionally, OPC Xi may be used as a standard .NET WCF interface for newly developed OPC servers.

Key features of OPC Xi:

• Security – secure communications including access through firewalls
• Simplicity - make servers and clients easy to implement, configure and deploy
• Robustness – reliable communications with error recovery
• Plug-and-Play – automatic discovery of servers and their communications capabilities
• Backward compatibility - accessing OPC DA, AE and HDA servers using a single .NET interface
• Protocol transparency – efficient client/server communications when both the client and server are on the same platform or within the same LAN and when the client is located on external networks including the Internet (see Figure below)

OPC Xi deliverables and source-code samples are available in the main downloads section.

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