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T. Frühwirth, P. Gutierrez-Peon, D. Etz, S. Gent:
"Enabling flexible real-time factory networks by combining OPC UA and TSN";
Talk: 4. Wiener Produktionstechnik Kongress - WPK 2018, Wien; 2018-09-26 - 2018-09-27.

Communication protocols are manifold and already today fulfill the vast majority of relevant requirements such as low latency and high transmission speeds. However, particularly on the shop-floor level, they are often closely tied to specific vendors and applications and thus suffer from drawbacks regarding interoperability and flexibility. The use of vendor-independent, standardized technologies promises to overcome these problems in the near future. Thereby, OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA) in combination with Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) is expected to play a major role. The information modelling capabilities of OPC UA allow to model the functionality of each device - from simple sensors to complex machines. Furthermore, it specifies services to browse these information models, read and write data values, call methods, etc. TSN as a mechanism for data transmission enables standard Ethernet traffic to co-exist with real-time traffic on the same communication network.

real-time communication, Time-Sensitive Networking, OPC UA