OPC UA solution for traffic management in Switzerland

Sopra Steria delivers IT-enabled business services and is the trusted transformation partner for private and public sector organizations across the globe. Combining an in-depth understanding of their clients’ businesses with expertise in IT and business process outsourcing, they take on our clients’ challenges and develop innovative solutions to address them efficiently and profitably. Through their highly collaborative consulting style, the company works with clients to transform their business, enabling them to focus on what they do best.

20,000 people, working across 16 countries, support the systems, services, and processes that make today’s world turn, touching the lives of millions around the globe each day. Founded in 1969, Sopra Steria has offices in Europe, India, North Africa, and SE Asia and a 2011 revenue of €1.75 billion. 21% of Sopra Steria’s capital is owned by its employees. Headquartered in Paris, Sopra Steria is listed on the Euronext Paris market.

Prosys OPC as a Development Support Partner

Prosys OPC is one of the few OPC UA SDK for Java providers and offers a very suitable entry point to the OPC UA technology with our QuickStart Service, and licensing model. The excellent support of Prosys OPC and the fast response time of their support team have positively confirmed Sopra Steria’s decision.

Traffic Management in Canton Valais, Switzerland

Sopra Steria is the traffic management SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) system provider for the whole canton Valais in Switzerland. The main task of this system includes central monitoring and alerting in case of events in tunnels or sections of the highway network of the Valais region.

Sopra Steria’s traffic management system is a real-time distributed Java-based application. The communication between Sopra Steria’s traffic management application and underlying systems (ventilation, fire alarm system, lighting system, etc.) used to be implemented with a project-specific text-based interface for all previously integrated tunnels. For the latest expansion of the traffic management’s perimeter (an additional tunnel and two galleries on the “Simplon Pass”), the Swiss Federal Road Agency has selected OPC UA as the new standard.

The underlying systems notify their current status with event-based methods to the SCADA system of Sopra Steria and receive corresponding commands from the superordinate system. The OPC UA solution of Prosys OPC has been used as a building block for this interface.

OPC UA Interface Experiences

The main advantage of using OPC UA is definitely that customers are now using a well-established official interface specification instead of a project-specific one.

During the implementation of the interface, the limitations of the COTS OPC UA Servers for PLC Devices posed the biggest challenge. For example, most of them do not support calling and executing methods; it was thus necessary to invest in creative workaround solutions that still guarantee secure and dependable operation. Sopra Steria’s OPC UA interface has been running reliably in production since the Fall of 2012.