UA Cloud Library

Goal

The JWG develop a specification for an Internet-hosted database containing OPC UA information models. This database can be made publicly accessible through a RESTful interface. User access control will be handled through a separate identity provider. This cloud library can be made available to manufacturers who are looking to leverage industrial assets containing non-standardized information models for their SCADA or analytics systems. Non-standardized information models are meant to describe information models that are not defined through an OPC UA companion specification.

Cooperation partners
The following organizations cooperate in the joint working group (JWG) “UA Information Model Cloud Library”:

  • Clean Energy and Smart Manufacturing Innovation Institute (CESMII) and
  • OPC Foundation

The output of the working group is a specification which defined a RESTful interface of the information model database. The query language to return results from the database have been defined also.

The cloud library is online and in operational work.

 

Technical introduction

The UA Cloud Library is an online store of OPC UA AddressSpaces. It provides a mandatory REST interface (as well as additional option interfaces) to upload, download and query for AddressSpaces.

For a Client application to access information from a machine today, it must browse the AddressSpace of the Server when it is online. A Client can use existing Information Models that are used in the AddressSpace to preconfigure the Client. However, today, the final configuration can only happen when the Server is online. For example, an industrial robot typically has an OPC UA Server built in. An AddressSpace can contain a combination of machine-specific and vendor-neutral Information Models.

See here for a typical, standardized OPC UA information model (that can be part of an AddressSpace of a real OPC UA server).

To identify a stored AddressSpace in the Cloud Library, a globally unique identifier such as the ProductInstanceUri (as defined in OPC 10000-100) or the ApplicationInstanceUri can be used.

The Cloud Library allows upload of a partial AddressSpace as a complete AddressSpace is not meaningful (e.g., the built-in Server Object found in namespace 0 is mostly the same). The Server Capabilities also found in namespace 0 is useful, however.

 

Use Cases
For each of the use cases, the OPC UA AddressSpace needs to be known up front, before a connection to the physical machine (containing an OPC UA server) is possible. Therefore, the AddressSpace for the machine needs to be available on the Internet on a global scale.

  • Configure the application behind the OPC UA Client which consumes the data from the machine
  • Specification compliance verification for new machines
  • Retrofit OPC UA to existing machines
  • Downloading a UA AddressSpace from the UA Cloud Library into a “blank” UA Server Instance
  • Engineering support from existing AddressSpaces

 

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