Real-time Industrial Communication by using OPC UA Field Level Communication

Real-time behaviour is one of the most important aspects of field level automation networks in factory communication. Various Real-Time Ethernet (RTE) technologies have been developed over the years to cope with the network requirements like latency, Quality-of-Service (QoS), reliability etc. of the field level networks. Because of their nature of vendor-dependency, these technologies have been incompatible with one another. In the era of Industry 4.0, an innovative approach is required to bring together this technology in order to solve the interoperability issue. Open Platform Communication Unified Architecture (OPC UA) is a vendor-neutral communication protocol which can be an answer to this incompatibility problem of field level factory networks. This paper aims to use OPC UA as a field level communication protocol in combination with the Time-sensitive networking (TSN) standards to simulate the real-time behaviour of field network.