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OPC, Open Productivity & Connectivity, is an industry-wide standard that breaks this proprietary lock by allowing open connectivity based on the principles adapted from widely accepted and applied ‘Microsoft Windows’ integration standards. OPC capabilities have been demonstrated in many practical applications and it is now a well-established approach for different competing manufacturers. It is now easily considered to be the standard interface in the Windows environment. If you are serious about reducing your costs of installing and maintaining your automation systems you need to use OPC.

This course will give the candidates necessary tools. The candidates will receive a valuable overview of OPC and understand why it is the standard of choice for data access in automation systems. The candidates will be exposed to and understand the essential components of OPC based on typical applications. You will understand how OPC servers are installed and how they are then accessed by OPC clients (which could be SCADA systems. The OPC specification will be discussed in great detail and you will be exposed to the development of OPC servers and clients. The interaction between OPC and DCOM will be discussed in detail. The latest trends and future developments with OPC in the USA and Europe will be detailed.

By the end of this course delegates will be able to:

• Describe what OPC is and how to apply it to your applications
• Demonstrate how an OPC Server is designed
• Demonstrate how an OPC Client is designed
• Understand OPC Data Access 2.0
• Describe the key components of OPC
• Describe the key features of OPC
• Configure a simple application to display data from the plant floor
• Build a complete SCADA System and supporting components using OPC
• Enhance your existing legacy control system networks to use OPC
• Understand why OPC is such a robust solution
• Know why you need to demand OPC in your products
• Migrate your process data seamlessly into your office Word/Excel/Access Applications

Design engineers, electrical engineers, engineering managers, network engineers, network system administrators, process control and instrumentation engineers, anyone involved in of automation or communication system or are applying PCs/PLCs/SCADA systems

Concepts & Definitions

·     Classes and objects

·     Clients, servers and client/server interaction

·     OLE, DDE and NetDDE

·     ActiveX, .NET

OPC Overview

·     What is OPC?

·     Problems addressed by OPC, The OPC logical object model

·     OPC data (sources, formats, etc), OPC client/server relationships

·     Current OPC specifications

COM & DCOM

·     What is COM?, COM basics

·     Classes, Interfaces

·     Components (proxy/stub files, wrappers)

·     Globally Unique IDs (GUIDs)

·     OPC registry entries (ProgID, ClassID, AppID, CatID)

·     OPC client/server interaction (in-process, local, remote)

·     Setting up DCOM (programmatically or declaratively)

OPC DA Specification (2.0)

·     Functional description

·     Logical object model (OPCServer, OPCGroup, OPCItem)

·     Typical server and client structures

·     Read/write methods (synchronous, asynchronous, refresh, subscription)

·     Data source (cache, device)

·     OPCServer interfaces and methods, OPCGroup interfaces and methods

·     Group and item properties, Server configuration procedure

Other OPC Specifications

·     OPC common information, OPC alarms and events

·     OPC batch, OPC Data eXchange (DX)

·     OPC historical data access, OPC security, OPC XML-DA

Communications Issues

·     Networking protocols, LANs, WANs

·     OSI model, Network infrastructure (Ethernet)

·     ‘Transports’ (TCP/IP)

Troubleshooting

·     DCOM protocol stack

·     Physical and data link layer problems

·     Network and transport layer problems

·     COM/DCOM-related problems

·     Client/server-related problems

·     Simulation and conformance testing

·     Error codes