Enabling Semantically Enriched Data Streams from OPC UA in Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems

Abstract

Within Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems (ICPS) data is constantly produced by various entities. To handle those data efficiently, stream processing and semantic stream-based reasoning are helpful techniques to react to changes in the environment or system. While OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA) is widely used at the Operational Technology (OT) level, its integration into an IT stream processing infrastructure proves to be cumbersome, due to the insufficiency of support and tooling required at the IT level. To bridge this gap, this paper introduces a novel approach for semantically enriching data streams from OPC UA servers using Semantic Web technologies. By leveraging existing technologies, the proposed architecture transforms industrial data into semantically annotated information streams. A proof of concept, using a laboratory-scale production cell, shows the feasibility of this approach. It shows the seamless integration of industrial data into the Semantic Web, laying the foundation for advanced reasoning over OPC UA data.