Research And Application Of OPC Communication Technology

OPC (OLE for Process Control) is Microsoft's COM/DCOM technology, based on an industry standard interface composed by the OPC server and OPC client, the development of OPC server and OPC client is not dependent on specific language. When the OPC specification upgrades the software only needs to add new interfaces, the development and upgrading are very easy and good compatibility with older versions. OPC technology for industrial process control provides a standard data access mechanism, enabling customers to use a unified way to access a variety of field devices, to further enhance the openness of the control system.The purpose of this paper is how to use OPC development tools to develop rapid and efficient OPC server. From the basic concepts of COM, COM properties to COM implementation and other aspects were analyzed; depth analysis of OPC communication mechanism. As the OPC data access applications directly to the problem, so this paper analyzes the working principle of OPC, OPC interface system and the OPC Data Access which have an important guiding role for the development of OPC applications; designing the OPC server, using rapid development tools GKOPCServer.dll to develop the OPC server, and testing it to make it into the application. And to further demonstrate the advantages of OPC technology in system integration and universal. In this paper, analysis and synthesis method are combined together as the research method, researching from the overall character and significance of OPC technology, and then detailing the various parts of OPC technology in order to develop the OPC server. The innovation of this research is to select the Access database of control system as OPC server data source to collect information, and there is no specific development of a separate hardware device driver, improved development speed and reduced development costs.