A homogenous approach to CERN/vendor collaboration projects for building OPC-UA servers

Industrial power supplies deliver high and low voltage to a wide range of CERN's detector and accelerator components. These power supplies, sourced from external companies, are integrated into control systems via industry standard OPC servers. The servers are now being modernized. A key lesson learnt from running the previous generation of OPC servers is that vendor specific, black-box implementations can be costly in terms of support effort, particularly in diagnosing problems in large production-site deployments. This paper presents the projects producing the next generation of OPC servers; following an open, collaborative approach and a high degree of homogenization across the independent partners. The goal is to streamline development and support costs via code re-use and a template architecture. The collaborations aim to optimally combine CERN's OPC and production operations knowledge with each company's experience in integrating their hardware. This paper describes the considerations and constraints taken into account, including legal aspects, product commercialization and technical requirements to define a common collaborative approach across three hardware manufacturers.