Behaviour-Oriented OPC UA Information Model Development for CPPS

A cyber-physical production system (CPPS) is a software-intensive intelligent production environment that enables seamless machine-to-machine communication. However, the diversity among machines and devices on the shop floor makes achieving system interoperability a daunting endeavour. While standardized middleware tools can be used to address technological interoperability, achieving semantic interoperability, particularly among the production data, can be a challenging task. The Open Platform Communication Unified Architecture (OPC UA) addresses this issue of semantic interoperability with its information modelling concept. However, there exists no systemic methodology at present to systematically analyse a CPPS for building OPC UA information models. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a behaviour-oriented system analysis methodology that can be used for the acquisition of relevant system data for developing OPC UA information models.