Research Of OPC-Based Shipborne Network Integration Technology

OPC (OLE for Process Control) is an application of OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) technology in process control systems. It is an interface standard in the control field in order to resolve communication problems between local device and monitoring software. It is based on the Microsoft Company's COM/DCOM technology, and uses the Client/Server model. This standard makes it possible for open and effective communications among different systems in a plug and play environment. It has been accepted by more and more software developers and hardware manufactures.The paper, sponsored by the CSSC's (China State Shipbuilding Corporation) marine industry fund, mainly studies the integration of Platform Systems Network and Campapaign Systems through analysis of the oversea Shipborne Network development with the combination of our naval demand. Because our naval ships use Ethernet in Campapaign Systems, and the control network usually uses CAN (Controller Area Network) bus, we focus on the integration of Ethernet and CAN bus. After comparison of several integration schemes, we make the conclusion that using "PC+OPC server" to realize the information integration is the best scheme at present. In order to verify this scheme, we refer to our naval ships navigation system to build a functional verification system in which VxWorks embedded RTOS is used to realize the OPC Data Access server, OPC Alarms and Events server taking into account of the real-time requirement of naval ships. Finally, the reliability and real-time property of the built system is verified by experiments.