This part of the IEC 62541 series describes the OPC Unified Architecture Profiles. The Profiles are used to describe the functionality that an OPC UA Server exposes or that an OPC UA Client consumes. The details of the functionality are specified in other parts of IEC 62541.

Profiles are used by vendors to advertise the OPC UA capabilities of their products. The Profiles a product supports will typically appear on product data sheets. Buyers will use this Profile information to specify and purchase products that work together and meet specific application requirements. Most OPC UA applications will conform to several, but not all of the Profiles.

Profiles are used to segregate features with regard to testing of OPC UA Products and the nature of the testing. This includes the testing performed by the OPC Foundation provided OPC UA Compliance Test Tool and by the OPC Foundation provided Independent Certification Test Labs. This could equally as well refer to test tools provided by another organization or a test lab provided by another organization, what is important is the concept of automated tool based testing verse lab based testing. The scope of this specification includes defining functionality that can only be tested in an a lab and defining the grouping of functionality that is to be used when testing OPC UA products either in a lab or using automated tools. The definition of actual TestCases is not within the scope of this document, but the general categories of TestCases are within the scope of this document.