What Is Industrial Communication Toolbox?

Industrial Communication Toolbox™ provides access to live and historical industrial plant data directly from MATLAB^® and Simulink^®. You can read, write, and log OPC Unified Architecture (UA) data from devices such as distributed control systems, supervisory control and data acquisition systems, and programmable logic controllers. You can also access plant and manufacturing data directly from AVEVA™ PI System™, and use this data for process monitoring, process improvement, and predictive maintenance applications.

You can work with data from live servers and data historians that conform to the OPC UA, OPC Data Access (DA), and OPC Classic Historical Data Access (HDA) standards. When communicating over OPC UA, you can securely connect to OPC UA servers using a variety of security modes, encryption algorithms, and user authentication methods. You can also use OPC UA Subscriptions to monitor values on an OPC UA server.

The toolbox includes Simulink blocks that let you model online supervisory control and perform hardware-in-the-loop controller testing. In both MATLAB and Simulink, you can verify algorithms by establishing a secure OPC UA connection to your plant and build connected digital twin models for IIoT applications. The toolbox also supports communication with edge devices and cloud servers over Modbus^® and MQTT protocols. You can read and write Modbus data using Modbus RTU or Modbus TCP/IP, and you can publish and subscribe to MQTT topics.

The toolbox provides apps and graphical tools to browse and connect to OPC UA and PI servers, and you can connect to Modbus devices without writing MATLAB code by using the Modbus Explorer app.