Modeling Variability and Persisting Configurations in OPC UA

Variability is crucial in the design of many advanced goods and it is also receiving increasing attention in production systems engineering. Since OPC Unified Architecture plays an important role when it comes to standardized information exchange in modern production systems, it can be a melting pot for information from various engineering domains, such as product design and production engineering — thus, it is an ideal place to hold variability information of products and production systems alike. Based on an initial variability information model we propose additional concepts for the persisting of configurations.