Migrating Cyber-Physical Systems to OPC UA

To support the vision of Industry 4.0 and smart factories, manufacturing companies need to evolve their machines towards intelligent, connected cyber-physical systems (CPS). Software is at the heart of these digital transformation processes. OPC UA (Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture) is an industrial standard for horizontal and vertical communication of CPS. The adoption of OPC UA has a significant impact on the design of industrial production systems and on the development process. In this paper, we report on our experiences of migrating a heterogeneous software stack of a series machine production company to OPC UA. We show that automated approaches (i.e., static code analysis, code generation, and documentation generation) are the foundation for a holistic approach for working with OPC UA across different system layers and development teams. Further, we outline challenges we have identified during the migration process.