Evaluating Domain-Specific Languages for the Development of OPC UA Based Applications

Abstract The OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA) is becoming more and more important for industrial automation products. The development of OPC UA components is currently supported by the use of special SDKs for OPC UA. However, these SDKs provide only low level support for creating OPC UA based applications. This leads to higher efforts in developing such applications. The domain-specific metamodel that OPC UA defines could serve as a good basis for creating domain-specific languages on a higher abstraction level. This has the potential of significantly reducing development efforts. In this paper, we analyse the various use cases within the development of OPC UA applications for their potential to be supported by a domain-specific language.