OPC UA Based User Data Interface at ELBE

The Electron Linac for beams with high Brilliance and low Emittance (ELBE) at Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) is operated using the SCADA system WinCC by Siemens. The majority of ELBE systems is connected to WinCC via industrial Ethernet and proprietary S7 communication. However, in recent years there was a demand to provide a more open and platform independent access to ELBE machine data. The Industry 4.0 standard OPC UA has been chosen to implement such an interface. We will show how we use OPC UA as a common communication layer between industrial and scientific instruments as well as proprietary and open source control system software. Our solution makes use of commercially available hard- and software, namely Simatic STEP7, Simatic WinCC v7.x by Siemens and IBH Link UA by IBHsoftec. Combining these products we designed an OPC UA based user data interface, which features encrypted communication and access control from the control room via WinCC. It is available for internal use, e.g. for feedbacks, and external use, e.g to log ELBE data along with experiment data or to provide data to ELBE operators for machine optimizations.