Open Platform Communications (OPC)

Open Platform Communications (OPC) is a series of standards and specifications for industrial telecommunication. An industrial automation task force developed the original standard in 1996 under the name OLE for Process Control (Object Linking and Embedding for process control). OPC specifies the communication of real-time plant data between control devices from different manufacturers. After the initial release in 1996, the OPC Foundation was created to maintain the standard. As OPC has been adopted beyond the field of process control, the OPC Foundation changed the name to Open Platform Communications in 2011. The change in name reflects the applications of OPC technology for applications in building automation, discrete manufacturing, process control and many others. OPC has also grown beyond its original OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) implementation to include other data transportation technologies including Microsoft's .NET Framework, XML, and even the OPC Foundation's binary-encoded TCP format.