Comparison of REST and GraphQL Interfaces for OPC UA

Autor: Tammi, Riku Ala-Laurinaho, Joel Mattila, Juuso Autiosalo, Jani Hietala, Heikki Laaki, Kari
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2022
Předmět:
Zdroj: Computers; Volume 11; Issue 5; Pages: 65
ISSN: 2073-431X
DOI: 10.3390/computers11050065
Popis: Industry 4.0 and Cyber-physical systems require easy access to shop-floor data, which allows the monitoring and optimization of the manufacturing process. To achieve this, several papers have proposed various ways to make OPC UA (Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture), a standard protocol for industrial communication, RESTful (Representational State Transfer). As an alternative to REST, GraphQL has recently gained popularity amongst web developers. This paper compares the characteristics of the REST and GraphQL interfaces for OPC UA and conducts measurements on reading and writing data. The measurements show that GraphQL offers better performance than REST when multiple values are read or written, whereas REST is faster with single values. However, using OPC UA directly outperforms both REST and GraphQL interfaces. As a conclusion, this paper recommends using a GraphQL interface alongside an OPC UA server in smart factories to simultaneously yield easy data access, the best performance, and maximum interoperability.
Databáze: OpenAIRE