OPC protocol was created to improve the interoperability of the hardware and software coming from different vendors. Its version, DA (Data Access) was made to … . If you had experience with enjoying the advantages of OPC DA then it is possible that you had certain challenges with it:
- Since OPC DA is based on the Microsoft’s COM and DCOM technology, it is oftentimes difficult to be configured to comply with the security settings of the factory network and go through several gateways and firewalls.
- Local systems may have incompatibilities in terms of data format, supported interfaces, or exchange protocols.
- In distributed system it is difficult to organize data transmission properly and have a convenient hierarchy of the systems.
To solve the task of communication in such applications are used OPC servers with support of tunneling.