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Is OPC UA the best way to get data from many Scada systems?

In my company, we have many distributed sites, and each of them uses a single Scada system provider (one uses Wincc, another uses another ...), and these systems work with almost the same information.

We need to get some general data from these systems, so I would like to know if OPC UA can handle this.

Can I buy or develop an OPC UA server that retrieves data from Scada systems to a client through web services?

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Although some SCADA applications may be OPC servers, this is usually not the case, and you usually do not read data directly from them. At 99%, you will read data from any PLC or data logger. They have specific protocols that can be abstracted when you have OPC servers for them. SCADA systems can read PLC data directly or through an OPC server. If they read through the OPC server, you can use the existing one. It is good if the OPC server is located on some server and does not work well if it is located on the SCADA operator station, which can be restarted without your control. Whenever you add a new communication object (for example, a new OPC server), you should first check to see if the current SW / HW configuration can handle this without any changes to existing systems. For example, you are trying to connect to the PLC and find out that you need to update the PLC network card to support another communication channel, or you need to parameterize it first to be able to talk to it, or that it allows only one message master and this role already occupied by SCADA station, etc.

To give you the exact answer to your question: YES, OPC UA is the best way to collect plant data. You should be aware that having OPC servers (or one OPC server with a large number of protocol plugins, for example, KepWare OPC Server) is just the first step. Then you will need to decide what to do with the data in real time. There are many OPC-compatible tools for displaying, archiving, and signaling. One serious player in this arena is OsiSoft with its PI History server and good tools for visualizing historical data and Excel plugins for serious data analysis. You will find much more if you browse the OPC Foundation website.

It’s good that OPC is a well-known standard, and you can create your own OPC server for a specific device and assemble it, display it, warn it, put it in trends archived by any other OPC tool that is compatible with the same standard version of OPC. I have created several custom OPC servers and it really works very well.

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If you like C # and .NET, and you have the money to sign up for OPCFoundation, then their QuickStart library is an option.

For your specific question about a more SOA-based architecture using OPC UA, see what I did with our RealTimeStack ( http://beeond.net/products/ ).

Scythe

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Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/1380436/

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