OLE for Process Control is becoming an increasingly popular choice when selecting a PLC communication interface in industrial automation. OPC is typically used for intra-plant communication between industrial applications at different levels in the plant hierarchy. For instance, all data relating to maintenance tasks and costs on plant equipment could be fetched from the maintenance schedules software and displayed in relation to the number of operational hours on each piece of equipment fetched from the SCADA system. And the easiest way to accomplish this would be to use OPC.

To support this growing trend for intra-plant communication and integration between different applications, IGSS supports the OPC Data interface version 1 and 2 on the OPC server side. This means that third-party applications, e.g. maintenance, recipe and batch applications, are provided with a simple and standardized way of communicating with the IGSS system. IGSS can also perform as an OPC client that can communicate with 3rd party OPC servers.

IGSS’ OPC server-side software can reside on any computer in the network as long as the network protocol is TCP/IP. The client-side IGSS OPC software is a communication driver that resides on the IGSS server and, in special cases, on remote stations.

(Image of OPC client-server side)