OPC and Allen Bradley

janner_10 · Aug 9, 2019

If the DCS is already talking to Siemens, the protocol is most likely Profibus or Profinet - A simple HMS Gateway for EIP Slave to PB/PN Slave - simple set up to.

JesperMP · Aug 9, 2019

janner_10 said:
If the DCS is already talking to Siemens, the protocol is most likely Profibus or Profinet - A simple HMS Gateway for EIP Slave to PB/PN Slave - simple set up to.

No, that is extremely unlikely.
What you describe would be the DCS and Siemens PLC being Profibus Master and Slave, or Profinet IO Controller and IO Device.
The DCS is most probably talking S7 Protocol with the Siemens PLC. Maybe via OPC.

parky · Aug 9, 2019

I have used Kepware a number of times & found it one of the best.
Siemens Simatic net was ****, kept falling over, RS Linx could be a nightmare sometimes.
Replaced a system that had over 28,000 tags I was a little concerned that this might be a problem I contacted Kepware & they assured me that they had a system out there that was reading over a million tags, I took this with a pinch of salt, however I have found Kepware to be very reliable (as far as I remember in 9 years of the latter system it never stopped communicating). It is easy to configure and never failed to install on all versions of MS from 2000 to Win 10 (note different versions over the years).

janner_10 · Aug 9, 2019

JesperMP said:
No, that is extremely unlikely.
What you describe would be the DCS and Siemens PLC being Profibus Master and Slave, or Profinet IO Controller and IO Device.
The DCS is most probably talking S7 Protocol with the Siemens PLC. Maybe via OPC.

Well that's up to the OP to ask what is currently onsite, we did 2 jobs last year linking an Alspa 8000 GE DCS using a PB Slave to EIP Slave via HMS Gateway

How the current DCS talks to the Siemens PLCs isn't the OP concern, as long as the DCS has a protocol he can gateway, he is fine. Might have none in which case OPC would be the way to go.

JesperMP · Aug 9, 2019

We are using OPC DA via Simatic NET and RSLinx on the same installations. Works fine for us.
We have tags around the 2000-mark at the most.
We never ever use DCOM.

lfe · Aug 9, 2019

harryting said:
Well, I honestly don't know how one get away from OPC these days or maybe we are talking about very different usage.

I would say OPC DA through DCOM is a completely mess and should NEVER be used in production environment. OPC DA between controllers are also to be avoided (maybe that's what you are saying). the problem is OPC DA runs on Windows and Windows only. UA is supposed to fix all that, in fact, Microsoft is supporting UA to run IOT devices and UA might also replace protocol like Ethernet/IP.

However, OPC as the com driver between controller and HMI or historian is about standard as it comes.

There are quite a few UA compliant OPC out there now. All Kepware OPC are supposed to be UA out of the box and Redlion's Edge controller also can convert something like hundred of protocol to UA.

The future for me is that HMI, SCADA talk OPC UA directly with the PLCs and forget about OPC servers installed on PC.

The reason is simple, OPC UA is in several ways superior to the protocols used previously.

At least Siemens, Omron and Codesys-based PLCs already offer OPC UA in some of their controllers ... and more to come for sure.

widelto · Oct 2, 2019

OPC UA is already available for AB and is called Factorytalk Gateway :
9355-OPD2350LENE FactoryTalk Gateway Distributed 5000 w/RSLinx Enterprise.
This bundle is for 5000 tags.

OPC and Allen Bradley

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lfe

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widelto

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