OPC UA Namespace best practice

Ignition
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1

Hello everyone, I'm currently working on a project central monitoring system for multi sites, initially we will integrate around 50 sites in one country divided into 3 zones, each site will have 3-7 controllers, on long-term that may scale to 5 different countries with many zones and 500+ sites. The communication between the controllers and Ignition is OPC UA, where each controller has a dedicated OPC UA server and Ignition is the client.

I would appreciate your suggestions and recommendations for the OPC UA best practice for building a well structured unifed name space based on OPC UA namespace standards.

I tried to do my homework and research and understood a little about NamespaceName and Index in OPC UA, and a little bit about NodeIds. However, I'm still not sure is it a good practice to include my hierarchy into the namespace like: Enterprise/Country/Zone/Site/Controller
That means creating a namespace for each controller, or Am I getting it all wrong?

Excuse my ignorance. Thanks in advance.

2 Likes
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While hierarchical naming can be very convenient, there always seems to be something down the road that breaks the mold & causes the original convention to fall short.

As such, I would entertain a very simple unique identifier for each site, especially one from an existing ERP system.

3

I understand that the traditional hierarchical convention has its limitations, I faced that before. However, I'm bound to the client mind set. I have no connection to the ERP, and as mentioned I have multiple controllers (aka OPC server) in each site, which I need to group them by site, region, country.

I have a preliminary design, but I wanted to know others recommendations and experience, to not fall into mistakes and it gets ugly when scale.

Thanks for your insights.