Selecting OPC UA features through OPC UA Profiles

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Selecting OPC UA features through OPC UA Profiles

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OPC Unified Architecture defines a wide range of features and information models. In addition there are several domain and use case specific specification extending OPC UA. It is expected that most OPC UA application will only implement a subset of these features. Servers and clients need to be able to describe which of the features they support.

OPC UA Part 7 - Profiles defines a grouping of feature that can be used to create a well-defined feature list. These profiles are also available as online version on the OPC Foundation web site. It is much easier to navigate through the profiles in the online version.
OPC UA Profile Reporting

The individual features are grouped into ConformanceUnits which are further grouped into Profiles.

Each ConformanceUnit represents a specific set of features (e.g. a group of services, portions of services or information models) that can be tested as a single entity. A ConformanceUnit is mainly interesting for developers of OPC UA clients and servers. ConformanceUnits are the building blocks of a Profile. For each ConformanceUnit there are a number of test cases that test the functionality described in the ConformanceUnit. The description of a ConformanceUnit is intended to provide enough information to illustrate the required functionality, but a developer will need to read SDK documentation or OPC UA specification to implement the ConformanceUnit. The OPC UA specifications are publicly available for everybody from the OPC Foundation website (OPCFoundation Downloads).

Profiles are named groupings of ConformanceUnits. The Servers and Clients in an OPC UA application will provide the names of Profiles that they support. The definition of Profiles is a dynamic activity, in that it is expected that new Profiles will be added over time.

The Profiles are used by product vendors to provide a feature list and by end users to select products based on their requirements.
Best regards
Unified Automation Support Team

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