OPC technologies | ||||
Links: | ||||
[print version] | ||||
OPC cross-platform connectivity OPC (OLE for Process Control) consists of a set of standards that define interoperability among different automation and control applications, field systems and devices, and business and office applications. OPC enables industrial applications to communicate in a consistent manner and brings the concept of plug-and-play to the process control world. Nearly all of the world's major providers of control systems currently support OPC. However OLE is based on the Windows COM (Component Object Model) standard, under the hood OPC is essentially COM. Over a network, OPC relies on DCOM (Distributed COM), which was not designed for real-time industrial applications. Moreover COM protocol is strictly focused on the Microsoft 32-bit platform set. Thus, it significantly retrain cross-platform OPC connectivity with any non-Microsoft OS platform. However these obstacles are cleared by OPC tunnelling technology, which also eliminates another big OPC headache for integrators: setting up DCOM. Linux-Windows and QNX-Windows OPC tunnelling OPC tunnelling means connecting an OPC Client to an OPC Server, over a network connection, using standard TCP networking instead of the troublesome DCOM networking. This technology not only avoids DCOM's long network timeouts, but also allows cross-platform OPC data networking from Linux to Windows and from QNX to Windows platform. RTS-Soft software engineers have an extensive experience in applying OPC tunnelling technology in the numerous own products and projects, ensuring reliability, compatibility and highest throughput of whole cross-platform system. Besides just OPC data networking our tunnelling technology brings another values to the end users, such as auto configuration and auto tuning. Thus, our own OPC server detects all available non-Windows clients on the net, reads their tag information and configure itself accordingly by using this advanced tunnelling technology. We have it implemented successfully in our Silver(tm) Soft DCS product. Java to OPC connectivity There is another proven solution which RTS-Soft can implement in any Java project which deals with OPC data. It is Java to OPC bridging. RTS-Soft offshore software development team provides effective utilization of its skills and experience for development of unique technology solutions for client tasks that encompasses the full development lifecycle from establishing client goals, requirement analysis, coding, testing and system deployment. |