OPC UA Companion Specification allows users to include defined information models to build their application over them. EUROMAP is the European umbrella association of the plastics and rubber machinery industry which provides technical recommendations for plastics and rubber machines. EUROMAP companion specifications provide a platform independent standard for interoperability with secure and reliable data exchange in the field.

The OPC UA SDKs available in market generally do not provide the support for such companion specs out-of-the box. The client approached us to prepare extension for the Matrikon Flex OPC UA SDK to support the EUROMAP information model for his PLCs.

The Matrikon Flex OPC UA SDK uses a set of helper C++ classes to support different types of objects which are generally derived using the Base OPC UA object classes. To Extend the support for EUROMAP companion specification, a third-party tool UMX Pro was used. UMX pro provides support to generate C++ helper classes to be used with Matrikon Flex OPC UA SDK for user defined objects. It can also generate the helper classes for companion specification by using the nodeset file of the companion specification as input. The UMX PRO was used to generate the required helper C++ classes for the objects, types and variables defined in the companion specification. The generated code was then updated to include the additional objects defined by the customer in the address space for his PLC.

A demonstration application was prepared using the generated helper classes and was shared to the customer. UMX pro reduced the time of implementation by a great extend which benefited the customer with reduced cost and time.