OPC UA is applicable to components in all industrial domains, such as industrial sensors and actuators, control systems, Manufacturing Execution Systems and Enterprise Resource Planning Systems, including the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), Machine To Machine (M2M) and others. It is designed to enable seamless information exchange and to support command and control functionalities for diverse industrial processes, spanning from device-level communication to enterprise-wide and cloud integration.

OPC UA defines a common infrastructure model to facilitate this information exchange. OPC UA specifies the following:

• the information model to represent structure, behaviour and semantics;
• the message model to interact between applications;
• the communication model to transfer the data between end-points;
• the conformance model to guarantee interoperability between systems.