"Matrikon’s OPC products and support service made what could have been a complicated integration go very smoothly. We were able to seamlessly integrate a combination of OPC clients, servers and utilities to build a best-of-breed solution – tailor-made to meet our requirements."
Process Control Engineer, Major American Paper Producer
As part of an initiative to implement Model Predictive Control, process control engineers at a major American paper mill in the southern U.S. needed to pass process variables between an Emerson DeltaV control system and a Siemens-Moore APACS DCS. The required solution would not only provide connectivity across platforms, but across two different network domains.
The project manager researched possible solutions and, after evaluating OPC demonstration software from Matrikon’s website, chose OPC as the technology to use to provide the connectivity he needed. This enabled him to integrate a custom solution to meet his specific needs with commercial off-the-shelf software.
Both control systems where equipped with OPC servers, but they were on two different network domains. The first part of the overall solution was to integrate OPC Data Manager to facilitate the communication of data between the two systems. OPC Data Manager acts as a double-headed client that enables two servers to exchange values. The second part of the solution had to overcome DCOM involved in communicating across two network domains. To handle this, Matrikon’s OPC Tunneller was installed on both the client node of one domain and the server node of the other domain. Tunneller enabled the two DCSs to exchange values seamlessly across different domains using TCP/IP instead of DCOM. Because OPC Tunneller only required an IP addres