Comparison of REST and GraphQL Interfaces for OPC UA

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openAccess

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Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

A1 Alkuperäisartikkeli tieteellisessä aikakauslehdessä

Date

2022-05

Major/Subject

Mcode

Degree programme

Language

en

Pages

17

Series

Computers, Volume 11, issue 5

Abstract

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 Architec-ture), 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.

Description

Funding Information: Funding: This research was funded by the Business Finland under Grant 3508/31/2019 and ITEA 3 Call 5 MACHINAIDE. Publisher Copyright: © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

Keywords

communication, GraphQL, Industry 4.0, interfaces, OPC UA, REST

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Citation

Ala-Laurinaho, R, Mattila, J, Autiosalo, J, Hietala, J, Laaki, H & Tammi, K 2022, ' Comparison of REST and GraphQL Interfaces for OPC UA ', Computers, vol. 11, no. 5, 65 . https://doi.org/10.3390/computers11050065