Case study on Integrating Legacy Devices in Industry 4.0 framework using OPC UA

Legacy devices refers to outdated electronic equipment for which the manufacturer has discontinued firmware updates. Many PLC devices have become obsolete and are unsupported by newer software. It is very expensive to fully replace these devices. This is where OPC UA serves as a solution. Open Platform Communication Unified Architecture (OPC UA) is an open source device to device communication protocol used in Factory Automation. This open interface standard is independent of the PLC manufacturer, the software developer, the operating system or the programming language. The existing communication protocols like profinet, Sercos are organization specific. And these protocols cannot communicate with each other. Also it has many feature limitations like the data cannot be pushed to the cloud and remote operation is not possible. We intend to automate the communication between the legacy devices with Siemens S7-1500 PLC using OPCUA. We are using a Raspberry PI, TIA Portal 14 software in windows PC and an Ethernet connection in-order to Push a data from legacy plc to cloud using OPCUA so it can be operated from anywhere in the world.