OPC UA Communication

APIS Hive offers OPC UA communication, both as an OPC UA Server and as an OPC UA Client.

When enabling the APIS Hive UA server, the following OPC UA profiles are implemented:

OPC UA communication can be initiated in two ways:

  1. A UA Client initiates a connection towards a UA Server, i.e. the Server offers an Endpoint listening for connections requests from client(s). Lets denote this the normal way to initiate a connection, or forward connectivity.

  2. A UA Server in initiates connection(s) towards one or more clients, in case the clients offers Endpoints the listening for connections request from the server. This is also called Reverse Connectivity.

A server can use any of those strategies when communicating with clients, i.e. offer one or both of the 2 ways to connect described above.

Enabling the Hive UA server

To enable the OPC UA Server for an Hive instance, you will need to enable one or more Endpoints for the instance. See here for how to add/enable an Endpoint for an Hive instance.

Once you have enabled one or more endpoints, the UA server of your instance will be subject for OPC UA communication (forward/reverse) according to the Endpoints configuration.

Also, you will need to decide what Primary Key Infrastructure to use, and which certificates to trust and/or reject.

Connecting to a UA server

In order to connect to a UA server, you will have to use a UA client. If you want to connect to a UA server (another APIS Hive instance or any other 3rd party server), you have to use an Apis OpcUa client module, and optionally an Apis OpcUa Proxy client module.

For further reading about OPC UA, please take a look at:

Adding/modifying an Endpoint

Please see here APIS Hive UA Server Endpoints for more details.

Advanced UA server configuration settings

The UA server has a set of advanced configuration settings, that normally just should be kept at their default values. These settings are described in more detail here APIS Hive UA Server Advanced Settings