Integration of discrete manufacturing field devices data and services based on OPC UA

The importance of information availability from field device to management level is continuously growing against the background for meeting the demands on competitive and flexible production systems in discrete manufacturing. Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm seems to promise to fulfill this requirement. However, SOA will not be applicable to every field device due to e.g. computational limitations. Therefore this paper presents an approach for the integration of manufacturing field devices based on fieldbus information models and services. This is done by a controller-based SOA gateway and a semantic transformation of fieldbus information models and services into OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA). An on-the-fly transformation of data and services based on OPC UA is proposed and validated using sercos III as Real-Time-Ethernet (RTE)-based fieldbus.