OPC-UA
The modern, secure, platform-independent standard for exchanging industrial automation data between machines and software.
OPC Unified Architecture (OPC-UA) is the successor to classic OPC, designed to move industrial data — from PLCs, CNC machines, robots, SCADA systems — to any consumer, on any platform, with security built in. Unlike Modbus's anonymous registers, OPC-UA exposes a browsable, typed information model: a client can discover that a server offers 'Line2/Filler/MotorTemperature' as a floating-point value in degrees Celsius, with units and metadata attached.
Its security model (certificates, encryption, authentication) and its semantic richness made it the backbone of Industry 4.0 architectures and the standard answer to 'how do we get data out of the automation layer without compromising it.' Companion specifications standardize information models for specific equipment classes, so a robot or an injection molding machine describes itself the same way regardless of vendor.
For maintenance platforms, OPC-UA is the high-fidelity ingestion path in plants with modern automation: runtime hours, alarm states, and process values flow into asset records with their meaning intact, enabling meter-based PM and condition monitoring without custom decoding.
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