RILHEVA manages OPC-UA

What is OPC-UA?

It is a standard protocol to exchange data created in 2008 and focused on cloud-based networks, currently used by different PLCs.

OPC-UA, Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture, simplifies communication by using discovery functions to quickly find all devices to connect to and to receive/send data. 

OPC-UA standard has been used in different fields such as:

  • Oil & gas
  • Food & beverage
  • Waste management and pharmaceutical

OPC-UA Protocol benefits

Using OPC-UA communication protocol for cloud, you achieve the following benefits:

  • Compatibility with all leading PLC manufacturers
  • It is bidirectional natively
  • Self-configuring: all connected devices are immediately available and usable for data exchange
  • Grants security standards, such as transmission authentication, authorization, integrity and privacy 
  • High quality performances even in case of hundreds signal managed
  • Any device that uses OPC-UA suites to Rilheva
Discover all the devices suitable for Rilheva that use OCP-UA protocol

Two examples of setup

Using OPC-UA protocol on PLC, PLC actually acts as a OPC-UA Server and Cloud Rilheva is therefore a OPC-UA Client.

In case PLC has no internet connectivity, a gateway has to be used to establish communication.

In this setup, Client must reach the Server and this can be achieved in 2 ways:

  1. Enabling a VPN channel between PLC and RILHEVA IIoT Platform
  2. Expose PLC on Internet through a public IP, adding security rules for access control and accepting communication from Rilheva Cloud only.

We strongly recommend the first choice: using VPN grants higher communication security.