OPC

OPC stands for OLE for Process Control as well as Openness, Productivity and Connectivity . It represents an industry standard that, based on COM/DCOM technologies, defines a set of vendor-independent interfaces for use in process automation. The OPC standard was specifically designed to meet the requirements of the process control level. OPC servers provide access to different data sources (for example, process control systems, SPCs, temperature sensors) and thus provide process data that OPC clients can request. The SAP ODA component is an OPC client that can communicate with OPC servers. This facilitates data exchange between applications considerably.

At present, OPC clients and OPC servers are PC-based systems with a Microsoft operating system.

For more information, see the OPC Foundation Web pages under http://www.opcfoundation.org and www.opceurope.org .

OPC Standards

The OPC Foundation offers a number of freely accessible OPC standards. They comprise interface descriptions for different areas of automation. These interfaces enable an efficient data exchange between software components from different vendors.

SAP ODA is based on the OPC standards OPC Data Access 1.x and 2.04 and OPC Alarms and Events 1.01 . We will refer to OPC servers supporting these standards as OPC Data Access servers (DA servers) and OPC-Alarms/Events serves (AE servers).