Department of Automation and Applied Informatics, Faculty of Automation and Computers, University Politehnica Timisoara, 300223 Timisoara, Romania.
Sensors (Basel). 2020 Sep 29;20(19):5591. doi: 10.3390/s20195591.
Communication protocols are evolving continuously as the interfacing and interoperability requirements are the foundation of Industry 4.0 and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), and the Open Platform Communication Unified Architecture (OPC UA) protocol is a major enabling technology. OPC UA was adopted by the industry, and research is continuously carried out to extend and to improve its capabilities, to fulfil the growing requirements of specific industries and hierarchical levels. Consistent issues that have to be approached are related to the latest specifications and the real-time context that could extend the applicability of the protocol and bring significant benefits in terms of speed, data volumes, footprint, security. The real-time context is essential in the automotive sector and it is highly developed within some specific protocols. The current work approaches first the conceptual analysis to improve the OPC UA interfacing using the Publish-Subscribe mechanism, focusing on real-time constraints and role distribution between entities, and considering some well-founded interfacing strategies from the automotive sector. The conceptual analysis is materialized into a solution that takes OPC UA Publish-Subscribe over User Datagram Protocol (UDP) mechanism to the next level by developing a synchronization algorithm and a multithreading broker application to obtain real time responsiveness and increased efficiency by lowering the publisher and the subscriber footprint and computational effort, reducing the difficulty of sending larger volumes of data for various subscribers and the charge on the network and services in terms of polling and filtering. The proof of concept is evaluated and the results prove the efficiency of the approach and the solution.
通信协议在不断发展，因为接口和互操作性要求是工业 4.0 和工业物联网 (IIoT) 的基础，而开放式平台通信统一架构 (OPC UA) 协议是一项主要的使能技术。OPC UA 已被业界采用，并且不断进行研究以扩展和改进其功能，以满足特定行业和层次的不断增长的需求。必须解决的一致问题与最新规范和实时上下文有关，这些问题可以扩展协议的适用性，并在速度、数据量、占用空间、安全性方面带来显著的好处。实时上下文在汽车行业中至关重要，并且在一些特定协议中得到了高度发展。目前的工作首先进行概念分析，以使用发布-订阅机制改进 OPC UA 的接口，重点关注实时约束和实体之间的角色分配，并考虑来自汽车行业的一些有充分依据的接口策略。概念分析体现在一种解决方案中，该解决方案通过开发同步算法和多线程代理应用程序，将 OPC UA 发布-订阅机制扩展到用户数据报协议 (UDP) 机制的下一个级别，以获得实时响应能力和提高效率，降低发布者和订阅者的占用空间和计算工作量，减少为各种订阅者发送大量数据的难度，并降低网络和服务在轮询和过滤方面的负担。概念验证进行了评估，结果证明了该方法和解决方案的效率。
