March 18, 2016 - The OPC Foundation and the AutomationML association release the companion specification AutomationML for OPC UA to realize interoperability within smarter factories of the future.
AutomationML is a data exchange standard for engineering data standardized in IEC 62814. It provides a family of standards to make engineering tools interoperable in order to decrease costs for data exchange, transforming data from one engineering tool to another, etc.
With the combination of AutomationML and OPC UA it is possible to communicate live and engineering data containing information about the status of a conveyor as well as about its abilities. Furthermore, the OPC UA system configuration can be transferred to AutomationML models. These two use cases reduce manual engineering effort and provide new possibilities to deal with smart data e.g. for predictive maintenance or – in general – data analytics in the factory.
The joint working group of the AutomationML and the OPC Foundation has dealt with this topic since 2014.
The Release Version 1.00.00 of the Companion Specification „AutomationML for OPC UA“ was published on February 22, 2016. The specification describes how to model AutomationML based information sets using OPC-UA information model and how to transmit them.
Dr. -Ing. Miriam Schleipen from Fraunhofer IOSB – head of the joint working group – states that “Plug-and-work is possible if we combine the description of items within production systems by AutomationML, the provision of this description in an OPC UA information model and the secured communication of this information via OPC-UA.Interoperability and the seamless semantic integration become reality.”
About AutomationML
The AutomationML initiative is an open and industrial consortium established in 2006 and transferred to a German association in 2009. It has now 34 members from different industrial areas with leading members like ABB, Daimler, Kuka, Siemens, and Volkswagen.
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 organization serves over 450 members worldwide in the Industrial Automation, Building Automation, Oil & Gas, and Smart Energy sectors.