Generation of OPC UA Companion Specification with Eclipse Modeling Framework

Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture (OPC UA) is a relevant technology in the field of machine-to-machine communication that defines data transport protocols and standardizes information modeling. Instead of defining a generalized world model, domain-specific models enable interoperability. These domain-specific models can be developed and released as Companion Specifications. More than 40 Companion Specifications are currently in development or already released. In this paper the current approaches to generate an OPC UA information model or an OPC UA Companion Specification are analyzed. A new modeling tooling based on the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) is presented. This tooling demonstrates the potential of a model-driven approach for the creation of the information model and the structured part of the descriptive text document of a Companion Specification.