Leveraging Relational Database for Fast Construction of OPC UA Information Model

With the development of manufacturing factory, massive devices are being deployed in production lines for performance monitoring and optimization, which raises the challenge of interconnectivity and interoperability among devices. OPC UA is widely recognized as one of the effective technologies to address such an issue. Traditional ways of constructing OPC UA information model need to manually add and define different nodes describing the devices and their attributes (e.g., names, ID, data types, etc.), which is costly and time-consuming when a huge number of devices is involved. Some works defined mapping rules between existing data model/structure/exchange format and OPC UA information model to reduce the workloads. However, they ignored the construction process of OPC UA information model and assumed that the existing referenced data structure/exchange format was created before the transformation of information model. Also, the mapping rules do not provide detailed implementation of mapping method. In this paper, we take the first attempt on the fast construction process of OPC UA information model. The raw data of field devices represented as structured data in rational database is fully utilized to extract the information, even though there are no existing data model for reference. The challenge of transforming structured data in database to OPC UA address space is discussed, based on which we propose a specific fast construction method for OPC UA information model. The method is deployed in the built industrial discrete manufacturing production line platform to evaluate the applicability of fast information model construction.