For general information on the OPC UA Companion Specification Mining and OPC UA in general, please refer to OPC 40160.
As part of the External Standards section of the OPC UA Companion Specification Mining, the IREDES standard uses OPC UA as carrier.
IREDES is a flexible standard architecture for convenient worksite information exchange in the mining industry. It is used for information exchange between mainly mobile equipment and devices on one side and central computer systems on the other side. Also, Machine-to-Machine (“M2M”) communication is covered to a certain extend. Excluded from the standard is any direct communication related to machine remote control as this is inside the product responsibility of the respective suppliers. The standard covers definitions of how to exchange information and what kind of content is exchanged. The flexibility of the standard is achieved by separation between the purpose of information exchange (Application Profile) and the dedicated type equipment using and extending the generic Application Profile information by specific entries for dedicated types of equipment (Equipment Profile).
This principle leads to a matrix structure of the information exchange interface:
- Application Purpose in the Application Profile (vertical structure)
- Equipment specific purposes in the respective Equipment Profile (horizontal structure).
The structure of the IREDES standard is shown in Figure 1. The structure is mirrored as far as possible in the IREDES OPC UA information model.
Figure 1 – Structure of the IREDES standard