In the previous chapters, we looked at how a typical industrial scenario works and at the existing technologies that have been in place since 1990. In this chapter, we are going to understand how to connect this old world to the new IoT world. We will look closely at how to connect and gather industrial data from different devices and data sources. In particular, we will explain the OLE for Process Control (OPC) protocol in detail. We'll start by looking at its original implementation in 1996, based on the Microsoft architecture of Component Object Model (COM) and the Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM), and track its progress right up to the current Unified Architecture (UA), which is based on open and interoperability standards.
We will then go into detail about some concepts that were outlined in the previous chapters. These...
