OPC UA

OPC UA (Open Platform Communication Unified Architecture) is an architecture for describing and exchanging machine data. In this respect, OPC UA is more than just a communication protocol - the architecture also includes data models and interaction concepts.
OPC UA is becoming increasingly widespread as a new market standard and provides the basis for open and standardized communication: it enables standardized data exchange between different platforms, thus improving interoperability and allowing data-driven performance optimization.

OPC UA is an integral part of PLCnext Technology and thus enables long-term compatibility for connection to third-party systems. PLCnext Technology controllers support two OPC UA communication models:

In PLCnext Engineer, both can be configured via the 'OPC UA' PLANT node.

Note
The OPC UA server-client model and the PubSub communication are completely independent of each other. Each of the two models can be operated without the other. Furthermore, a publisher or subscriber can be an OPC UA server or client at the same time or vice versa.