Subclause 6.2 describes the identifiers, types and structure of the objects and methods that are used to implement the OPC UA mappers defined in this document. This implementation serves three purposes:

  • support of the safe exchange of SPDUs at runtime
  • online browsing, to identify SafetyConsumers and SafetyProviders, and to check their parameters for diagnostic purposes
  • offline engineering: the information model of one controller can be exported in a standardized file on its engineering system, be imported in another engineering system, and finally deployed on another controller. This allows for a vendor-independent exchange of the communication interfaces of safety applications, e.g., for establishing connections between devices.

NOTE Neither online browsing nor offline engineering currently supports any features to detect errors. Hence, no guarantees with respect to functional safety are made. This means that online browsing can only be used for diagnostic purposes, and not for exchanging safety-relevant data. In the context of offline engineering, the programmer of the safety application is responsible for the verification and validation of the safety application. It must be assumed that errors may occur during the transfer of the information model from one engineering system to another.

As a consequence, all type values described in 6.2 are defined as read-only, i.e., they can not be written by general OPC UA write commands.