Safety multicast is accomplished by placing multiple SafetyProviders on Controller A, and by connecting each of them to a SafetyConsumer on one of the Controllers B1, B2, … BN, each.

The protocol OPC UA Safety is designed in such a way that:

• the state machine of the SafetyProvider has a low number of states, and thus very low memory demands,
• all safety-related telegram-checks are executed on the consumer and, thus, the computational demand on the SafetyProvider is low.

Therefore, even if many SafetyProviders are instantiated on a device, the performance requirements will still be moderate.

The properties of simple unicast are also valid for safety multicast: different sets of consumers can connect to SafetyProviders at different times, and new consumers can be introduced into the system without having to reconfigure the SafetyProvider instances. As all SafetyProvider instances send the same safety application data (same data source), it is irrelevant from a safety point of view to which SafetyProvider instance a given SafetyConsumer is connected. Thus, all SafetyProvider instances can be parametrized with the same set of IDs for the SafetyProvider.