Power, Performance and Platform Independence, 3 P’s of OPC

OPC Unified Architecture (UA) is the next generation OPC standard providing a cohesive, secure and reliable cross platform framework for access to real time and historical data and events. With OPC (UA), standard industrial applications developers will have the freedom to choose a development platform.

Powerful new features, Methods and Programs
Existing OPC COM specifications give more attention to data or events. However many applications reply on complex tasks that cannot be reduced to a single data value or event. Using OPC UA methods, servers can permit clients to invoke complex functions with a set of parameters. These functions can be used to control a background process which raises events to report its progress.

High Performance
OPC UA offers the capability to pre-encode messages with UA Binary before packaging them in a SOAP/XML compatible message improving performance by as much as 10 times as compared to the same message sent using XML. This architectural improvement provides benefits even when using SOAP/XML. This pre-encoding reduces the complexity and size of the XML before it is sent on the network.

Platform Independence
OPC UA architecture is designed to deliver high performance while being platform independent. This means developers can use their choice of languages and operating systems to develop OPC UA applications without being required to employ the lowest common denominator of SOAP/XML over HTTP.