Development of an OPC Client-Server Framework for Monitoring and Control Systems

In this article, the current technological state of OPC (Openness, Productivity, and Collaboration; formerly “OLE for Process Control”) standards and the problem statement of these OPC standards are discussed. The development of an OPC clientserver framework for monitoring and control systems is introduced by using the new OPC Unified Architecture (UA) specifications, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), web services, XML, etc. The developed framework in turn minimizes the efforts of developers in learning new techniques and allows system architects and designers to perform dependency analysis on the development of monitoring and control applications. The potential areas of the proposed framework and the redundancy strategies to increase the efficiency and reliability of the system are also represented according to the initial results from the system that was developed by the Visual Studio 2008 and OPC UA SDK. Keywords—OPC, OPC UA SDK, Monitoring and Control, Redundancy, Unified Architecture