Unified Automation Forum

Hi,

We are unified automation customer and currently developing an application using the .net sdk and uamodeller. it works quite well but we are now concidering exporting planned maintenance of a shop-floor through opc-ua. How should we represent this? Has anyone experience with modeling this kind of data?

We are considering a model like this

MaintenanceFolder
-- Unit1Object
----- PlannedMaintenance
-- Unit2Object
----- PlannedMaintenance
-- Unit3Object
----- PlannedMaintenance

A maintenance is defined byt some attributes like startdate, duration , descriptions, etc ...
Ideally planned maintenance should contained an Array of MaintenanceObjects. But array of custom objects seems not to be very well supported.
We could dynamically add a new node under each units for every planned maintenance. But then it is difficult for client ot subscribe to them. They will need to browse at a given time interval...

Any ideas or comments?
Thanks
Olivier

Hi Olivier,

There is not much background in your question but I think OPC UA Alarms & Conditions may cover your requirements.

Every time you have a new planned maintenance coming up, you can create a maintenance condition object and you can add it anywhere in the address space - ideally to the object that requires maintenance.

A client just needs to create one event monitored item that filters for the maintenance condition event and will get informed about any new maintenance condition or about state changes of existing conditions through events. If a client connects to a server, it can call Refresh on the new event monitored item and will get all maintenance condition where the Retain property is set to True.


Another option is to use an array of structure data type like mentioned in your post. You can generate code for structure data type support for the .NET SDK with the UaModeler. UaExpert can now display user defined structure data types and also the C++ SDK is able to work with unknown custom structure data types. This generic support will also be added to the .NET SDK.


Best Regards,
Unified Automation Support Team

Great, I did not realize how easy it is to use custom structs as datatypes.
Thank you for your help