Conversion to an OPC UA FX AML Information Model – OPC Unified Architecture

8.3.6 Conversion to an OPC UA FX AML Information Model

Conversion to OPC UA FX AML Information Model is a support function that converts the internal model of an engineering tool to an OPC UA FX AML model, which can be serialized to a Descriptor.

The main steps for conversion are:

Ability to produce OPC UA FX AML content from the configuration done in the internal model of an engineering tool;
Serialize the model into AML files.

There are three options for producing the OPC UA FX AML content. This is shown in Figure 22.

The Controls Engineer creates the AML model directly using an engineering tool that allows the creation and editing of AML structures using the OPC UA FX AML Libraries. In this case, no conversion to AML is needed, but the serialization step is still needed.
The Control Engineer starts with the OPC UA FX Information Model in NodeSet format and uses a conversion tool to create an OPC UA FX AML file.
An existing Information Model in a vendor-specific format is converted into an OPC UA FX AML file using a vendor-specific conversion tool. For developing vendor-specific conversion tools, a software library for the creation of AML files (AMLEngine) is available from the AML Association.