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Using OPC Unified Architecture and MTConnect for Data Acquisition and Upstream Communication

Undergraduate #102
Discipline: Technology and Engineering
Subcategory: Civil/Mechanical/Manufacturing Engineering

Benjamin Standfield - Virginia State University


With the increase in cyber security and the popularity of trends like Industry 4.0 and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) the communication between industrial machines and the corporate network becomes more important but also more challenging. With increasing popularity of using numerically controlled machine tools, a variation developed in terms used to describe the same variables, components, and devices developed. For example, terms ‘XPos’ and ‘AxisPos1’ might refer to the variable on two different industrial machines. In hopes of solving this, a machine tools technical standard was developed, called, MTConnect. After acquiring this now uniformly structured data from industrial machines, there comes the question of how does one safely transfer this data to a corporate network. In addition to acquiring data with MTConnect, there needs to be a way of safely transmitting the data upstream. For such a task, there is another standard called OPC Unified Architecture (UA), a data transfer protocol with a strong emphasis on security. This project focused on creating a means of deciphering MTConnect data and creating an OPC UA server one can connect to for data retrieval.
The application created for this project is an MTConnect client which retrieves user selected data from an MTConnect agent. The client then hosts an OPC UA server that serves the collected data items to other OPC clients, and in addition exports each item to its own CSV file.

Funder Acknowledgement(s): Commonwealth Center for Advanced Manufacturing (CCAM)

Faculty Advisor: Nasser Ghariban, nghariban@vsu.edu

Role: I created the program that probes an MTConnect agent for data. Most of the code revolving around hosting the OPC UA server comes from their provided sample; however, i made slight alterations to make it easier for an end user to configure.

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This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under Grant No. DUE-1930047. Any opinions, findings, interpretations, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of its authors and do not represent the views of the AAAS Board of Directors, the Council of AAAS, AAAS’ membership or the National Science Foundation.

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