Topkapi software platform is an essential building block of the company's information system, which must be integrated into an ecosystem of often heterogeneous solutions. In this context, its publisher AREAL devotes time to developing the interoperability of its solution with third party solutions, whether hardware or software. The OPC UA standardised technology is a response to this need for interoperability by standardising exchanges between components. AREAL is a member of the OPC Foundation, which promotes this technology.

OPC UA is today positioned by the OPC Foundation as the solution for interoperability between components. Version 6.2 of Topkapi is an OPC UA client and server:

• Client for real-time or time-stamped data acquisition at source and control from OPC UA servers. The latter can be software communicating with field equipment, equipment that natively integrates this protocol into its communication coupler or simply other software platforms that integrate this function.
• A server for making data from the supervision application available to third-party solutions, whether it be current data (known as real-time data) or historical data.

The first possible use of this OPC UA connector is to exchange data between two Topkapi applications. One is a server and therefore behaves like a lambda data source, and the other is a client with its own application independent of the first.

A second use is to use Topkapi as a communication front-end, exploiting its native multi-protocol acquisition capabilities and serving the data in OPC UA to a third-party application. 
It should be noted that the advantage of OPC UA compared with its previous version OPC DA (which is still in use) lies in the security of the data (possible exchanges of encrypted/certified/authenticated data) and in the simplification of its implementation by freeing itself from the COM/DCOM communication layer when the server and the client are not on the same PC (as it was the case in OPC DA).

AREAL regularly upgrades its OPC UA connector to meet the needs of the various business sectors it addresses. Furthermore, the implementation of the OPC UA layer within the various solutions offered on the market is not always homogeneous: do not hesitate to contact our teams for any information.