Solutions

OPC Unified Architecture goes beyond the limitations of existing OPC interfaces and provides solutions for numerous new use cases. The functionality and enhancements of OPC UA offer various possibilities for implementing and using solutions on different platforms.

For standard use cases Unified Automation developed standard products using the advantages of OPC UA. These products can be used out of the box and can be combined with other systems supporting OPC UA or legacy OPC standards.

To cover special use cases, Unified Automation provides platform independent Software Development Kits based on the portable OPC UA ANSI communication stack. All SDKs can be ordered with platform layers for Windows, Windows CE or Linux. Additional platform layers are available on request.

Deliverables and OPC UA SDKs

To avoid confusion on deliverables, toolkits, SDKs and examples the following table gives an overview on deliverables available at the OPC Foundation (for members only) and commercial SDKs (for everybody) adding convinience, general functionality and support to the pure OPC Stack. For rapid development and professional support you will need a SDK / Toolkit.

* all platforms that (at least) support C++ compiler (multi task / multi thread)
√ available at Unified Automatin GmbH
• available at OPC Foundation (corporate members only)

OPC Foundation

The OPC Foundation provides deliverables for it's member companies. These include three OPC UA Stacks (.NET, ANSI C and Java). The OPC Foundation is the official manager of the code base for all the three UA Stacks. The .NET-UA-Stack was developed by OPC Foundation, the Java-UA-Stack was developed by Prosys and the todays most used ANSI C-UA-Stack was developed by ascolab. In addition the OPC Foundation provides a sample implementation of UA Server and Client in .NET (C#). This code is called .NET-SDK and was taken as the base for many other .NET-SDKs.  But unfortunately this package reqiures the latest .NET Version V3.5.1 and can only be used on Microsoft operating systems, generally running on x86 platforms, thus it is far away from beeing platform independant.

NOTE: a misleading wording gives the impression that the OPC Foundation provides a Java-SDK, but in fact this is just the "pure" Java-UA-Stack and it's far away from being a Software Development Kit. A real Java-SDK is available at Prosys and Unified Automation GmbH

UA GmbH

Unified Automation offers the OPC UA Stacks to "non-members" and fully concentrates on platform independent development. In addition to the "pure" OPC UA ANSI C Stack we provide commercial SDKs that simplify professional development of OPC UA enabled applications. Besides running on literally all platforms (the only requirement are Berkley Sockets) we provide different platform adoption layers for x86, ARM, SH, Atom, etc. and we support several Operating Systems like Linux, Windows CE, Solaris, QNX, Euros, vxWorks, etc. 

• Cross Platform Development - base framework

• Embedded Device Development - small footprint

• Enterprise Application - rich information modell 

• Legacy Support - upgrade to state of the art technology 

• Demonstration and Education - evaluation usage