Suitability of OPC UA for distributed energy monitoring

According to ISO 50001, energy management systems have become widespread in the manufacturing industry. Especially for most large, energy-intensive companies, an energy management system has become an indispensable component of cost planning and sustainability strategy. Energy monitoring is used for continuously evaluating energy flows. Networked and distributed monitoring in industrial production environments is becoming increasingly common with cyber-physical systems (CPS) and can take advantage of them. Considering this, the OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA) framework plays a decisive role, as it networks all factory components and creates a standard for interoperability between the components. In a literature review context, this paper examines the flexible OPC UA standard, particularly concerning its applicability to energy monitoring. The research question concerns which OPC UA aspects are of relevance for an energy management system. To reduce the technical resources, a subset of the complete standard tailored to the specific task can also be available in the components. Here, we investigate the requirements an energy-related CPS has to fulfill and extract the standard’s relevant components and characteristics from the OPC UA framework based on these requirements. Using the information model of OPC UA, an energy sensor becomes a CPS. We demonstrate this process in a prototypical implementation.