MIGRATION FROM OPC-DA TO OPC-UA

The OPC-DA specification of OPC has been a highly successful interoperability standard for process automation since 1996, allowing communications between any compliant components regardless of vendor. CERN has a reliance on OPC-DA Server implementations from various 3rd party vendors which provide a standard interface to their hardware. The OPC foundation finalized the OPC-UA specification and OPC-UA implementations are now starting to gather momentum. This paper gives a brief overview of the headline features of OPC-UA and a comparison with OPC-DA and outlines the necessity of migrating from OPC-DA and the motivaion for migraing to OPC-UA. Feedback from research into the avaiblability of tools and testing utilities will be presented and a practical overview of what will be required from a computing perspecive in order to run OPC-UA clients and servers in the CERN network.