The OPC UA (Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture) protocol provides a publish-subscribe client-server technology for reliable data transmission. Its architecture ensures more secure communication than its OPC predecessor, OPC DA. The OPC UA protocol offers a solution for industrial IoT because it interacts with dedicated controllers and sensors, as well as with large enterprise databases and data analysis systems.

When handling devices that implement OPC UA, Manufacturing Connect Edge is deployed either as an OPC UA server or an OPC UA client.

The OPC UA servers support a flexible Hierarchy for mapping to the OPC UA clients.

The OPC UA protocol works with a wide variety of security models and transport layers. IoT applications face the following challenges.

OPC UA servers can have hundreds of different configurations:

OPC UA evolved from the OPC DA (Data Access) protocol, where the clients and servers worked only in Windows. Therefore, many of the OPC UA native features, such as Discovery, work well only in Windows.

For example, when the TCP connection is on a Windows server, Manufacturing Connect Edge cannot connect to it, even if other Windows-based agents can connect. Windows imposes this restriction.

As an additional challenge, not all OPC UA security policies match standard software security policy practices.

For example:

Sign vs Sign & Encrypt represents complex technology and it requires some effort to generate these certificates.

Manufacturing Connect Edge does not support custom SSL certificates, but it has its own certificate manager, which supports different encryption levels.