Exploring the Synergy Between CPS and OPC UA in Digital Twin Development: A Comprehensive Research Study

This paper investigates the possibility of communication between the digital twin of a cyber-physical system and a PLC emulator via the OPC UA interface. A cyber-physical system, CPS for short, is a system that connects the physical hardware part with the cyber part, which represents the system control, software or various algorithms. In our case, we used the CPS system MPS 203I4.0 from Festo Didactic and the digital twin model was created in the NX Mechatronics Concept Designer (NX MCD) environment. Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture (OPC UA) is an important tool for communication between the two platforms and a secure open standard for communication between devices, defined as machine-to-machine (M2M) communication, where we use a platform from Rockwell Allen Bradley. The aim of this study is to investigate, test and evaluate the success of communication between the different components of an application whether such a system has some limitations with respect to the types of signals and data. Because of the investigation, it was found that communication was successful across all platforms, different signals were tested, but only specific data types worked on the digital twin side, which is due to the NX MCD software itself.