May 1, 2018 – The OPC Foundation announced that VDW, Germany’s Machine Tool Builders Association, has adopted the OPC UA standard as the interoperability foundation the VDW will build its long term Industry 4.0 strategy on. Representing over a hundred twenty mid-size machine builder enterprises, the VDW is collaborating with the OPC Foundation and vendors including VDW members Chiron, DMG Mori, Emag, Grob, Heller, Liebherr Verzahntechnik, United Grinding, Trumpf and their controller suppliers including Beckhoff, Bosch Rexroth, Fanuc, Heidenhain and Siemens in the common pursuit of establishing an open, consistent, OPC UA based method for multi-vendor and multi-generation machines to share context rich data between each other and with broader enterprise and cloud based IT infrastructures.
As Dr Heinz-Jürgen Prokop, Chairman of the VDW explains “Our goal is coherently harmonized networking of the production operation; the vehicle for this purpose is OPC UA, and the energy that drives us forward is the jointly specified constant component of the data that we have to exchange for this purpose”.
About the OPC Foundation
Since 1996, the OPC Foundation has facilitated the development and adoption of the OPC information exchange standards. As both advocate and custodian of these specifications, the Foundation’s mission is to help industry vendors, end-users, and software developers maintain interoperability in their manufacturing and automation assets. The OPC Foundation is dedicated to providing the best specifications, technology, process and certification to achieve multivendor, multiplatform, secure, reliable interoperability for moving data and information from the embedded world to the enterprise cloud.