Research And Designation Of Universal OPC Server

In recent years, with the rapid development of information technology in the automatic control field, information sharing in very large area is needed stronger and stronger in automatic systems. Therefore, the opening for industry automatic systems is also needed higher and higher. It's just driven by this that the OPC technology emerged. OPC, which means OLE for process control, is a set of interface standard for industry commonly developed by several big automation companies, software and hardware venders, and Microsoft company.The emerging of OPC, not only provided a set of opening and accordant interface specifications for field devices, applications of automatic control, and application software for enterprise management, but also enabled"randomly-plug and randomly-use"connections between software and hardware from different venders. At present, OPC technology has become an important tool for system integration and data exchange in industrial control.However, OPC specification does nothing other than defines a set of standard interface, and the implementation of OPC server must be different by devices. What is implied is that every device vender needs to develop an OPC server for it's device which generally can only be used for one or several devices. Evidently, it's a kind of redundancy. What's more, OPC specification is extremely complicated and includes a great many contents so that mastering OPC technology is of so much difficulty. To many small hardware manufacturers, the development of OPC server is still a technical problem.In regard of above disadvantages of OPC, this paper presented the new technology of Universal OPC Server which standardized the interface between OPC servers not only and application programs, but also and hardware devices. This technology enables OPC server to be used for all kinds of devices, and extends the opening of OPC even further. Meanwhile, because of the simplicity of new interface specification between servers and devices, hardware device manufacturers need nothing but simple driver programs for their devices to integrate then with application programs by universal OPC server. As a result, the developing burden will also be released greatly.