About Course:

This Course has been designed to Understand the Fundamentals of OPC, where you will get answers of all OPC related questions.

What Is OPC?

OPC: Open Platform Communications or OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) Process Control.

OPC is the interoperability standard for secure and reliable information exchange in industrial automation and the enterprise. The original OPC specification was developed in the mid-1990s by a group of automation industry vendors to standardize data exchange between software applications and industrial automation hardware devices.

The OPC specifications define an interface between clients and servers, and servers-to-servers, so system components like PLCs, HMIs and any OPC-aware device can share data without having to develop custom software device interface applications.

Why Is OPC Important?

The OPC standard brings plug-and-play connectivity to industrial automation. Before OPC, application vendors had to develop custom software for every third-party device and application that needed to be integrated into the automation system. With OPC, you get open connectivity across products, independent of your hardware or software platform. OPC defines the standard way for sharing real-time data, historical data, and alarms & events, reducing your integration and total life cycle costs for system implementations.

What Are The OPC Technologies?

The two primary technologies that comprise the OPC standards are OPC Classic and OPC UA (Unified Architecture).

OPC Classic is the original architecture, first released in 1996, based on Microsoft Windows technology, using COM/DCOM (Distributed Component Object Model) which was the Microsoft standard for software application communication.

OPC UA integrates all the functionality of the existing OPC Classic specifications into a single service-oriented architecture, while adding new features to OPC, such as platform independence, complex information modeling, security, and reliability.

Importance of OPC Technologies in Process Automation?

OPC gives production and business applications across the manufacturing enterprise access to real-time plant-floor information in a consistent manner, making multi-vendor interoperability and "plug and play" connectivity a reality.

OPC also delivers additional business benefits in the form of increased flexibility, and reduced system integration, development and installation costs of factory automation and process control systems. OPC is here and can help users solve real manufacturing problems today.

By the end of this course, you will be able to Answer All Fundamental Questions about OPC.