Overview & Benefits

The OPC Foundation recommends the use of products certified by OPC Foundation accredited Certification Test Labs!

What is Certification?

The OPC Foundation’s Certification and Compliance program exists to help members develop and deliver high quality products that meet minimum operability requirements. OPC Certified products are:

  • Compliant with the OPC specifications
  • Interoperable with other OPC products from other vendors
  • Robust, reliable and able to recover from lost communications, etc.
  • Usable, by following universally accepted best-practices
  • Efficient in managing resources (CPU, memory, disk space etc.)

The Certification program is under the jurisdiction of the Compliance Working Group, a working group of volunteers responsible for:

  • The rules of the certification program
  • Definition of test cases and test-procedures for compliance to OPC UA Profiles (Profiles available here)
  • Guidelines for the OPC Foundation Certification Labs
  • Continued development and refinement of the certification program

What is Certifiable?

Any OPC UA Client or OPC UA Server or OPC Publisher or OPC Subscriber or OPC Classic (DCOM/COM) product can be certified by an OPC Foundation accredited Certification Test Lab. These products may be software based (running on Windows, Linux, etc.) or hardware based (in PLCs, or embedded controllers, etc.). They may implement the current release of the OPC Foundation specification or one of the prior releases. The following releases are supported for certification:

Software Development Kits (SDKs) or “toolkits” cannot be certified directly because, by design, they require the developer (customer) to implement code that is responsible for the address-space, acquisition and handling of data and events, security, and more. Reference implementations (Sample Clients and/or Sample Servers) shipped with the SDK can be tested and certified in an OPC Foundation accredited Certification Lab. Applications developed with an SDK that has a certified reference implementation stand a much higher chance of certification, but require their own certification testing in order to become officially certified products.

The Certification Program’s Value Proposition

Certified products have been tested in an OPC Foundation accredited Certification Lab and have met or exceeded the requirements described above. The benefits of using Certified Products include:

  • Faster configuration and start-up with fewer support calls
  • Proven reliability and interoperability
  • Minimal integration risks and an investment in quality that your production system can rely on

Certification Testing Costs

OPC Certification Testing is a premium service available to OPC Foundation members and logo members:

  • Corporate Members: US$950 per day
  • Logo-members: US$1900 per day

Testing typically varies between 5 to 10 days for an OPC UA Client or between 3 to 7 days for an OPC UA Server depending on the OPC UA Profiles/Facets they support. Information model testing will add to the overall total days. All exposed OPC functionality is tested. A complete list of Profiles/Facets is available via the on-line profile reporting tool

The Certification Logo

Products that have successfully completed certification testing are awarded the Certification logo.

OPC Certified Logo Sample

Vendors that earn the right to display the logo must abide by a specific Logo License Agreement. The Logo attest to the products conformance to the OPC Standards. End users are encouraged to look for and obtain products that display the OPC Certified Logo.

FAQs

  • Which takes longer to test, Clients or Servers?
    It really depends on the Profiles and Conformance Units supported by the product, but generally, clients will take longer to test because a client requires more manual testing.
  • What if my product is a Client and Server, or supports UA and Classic?
    More time will be required for testing the additional Profiles or the Classic Interface. Please contact us to discuss your product’s functionality and we can provide an detailed estimate.

For more information…

For an online catalog of OPC Foundation certified products, see the Certified Products page.

To learn more about the OPC Foundation Certification Program and Compliance, contact the Compliance Staff.

Click here to get started with Certification.