Model transformation between OPC UA and UML

OPC Unified Architecture (UA) is a platform-independent standard for message-based communication between clients and servers on various types of network to facilitate information exchange. OPC UA has been adopted in various domains such as power grids, building automation, and smart devices to support interoperability of involved systems. These domains also use Unified Modeling Language (UML) as the standard notation for data modeling or system modeling. Use of two different notations in the same domain causes compatibility issues. To address this, we present an approach for transforming OPC UA to UML to improve their compatibility and integration. In the approach, we rigorously analyze the semantics of OPC UA elements and establish a mapping between OPC UA elements and UML elements based on the analysis. Based on the mapping, we define transformation algorithms using Query/View/Transformation (QVT) which is a standard model transformation language by OMG. We demonstrate the approach using case examples in the power grid, building automation, and smart device domains.