OPC UA-Based Smart Manufacturing: System Architecture, Implementation, and Execution

Smart manufacturing systems have a highly heterogeneous structure that leads to complexity in satisfying the requirements of various underlying application domains. To achieve smart control and intelligent automation, one core issue is the realization of horizontal and vertical integration of heterogeneous industrial automation components. In this paper, a system architecture for a smart manufacturing process is proposed, in which the open platform communications unified architecture (OPC UA) technology is utilized to integrate various industrial field networks into the top-level factory energy management system (FEMS). The proposed architecture is verified to be reasonable and feasible through the implementation of the integrated system in a lab-level experiment.