November 15, 2019 - As part of a joint project, members of the VDMA OPC Machine Vision Initiative together with the OPC UA Foundation, have developed a hardware demonstrator that includes the practical implementation of the "OPC UA for Machine Vision (OPC MV) Part 1 Companion Specification". OPC MV Part 1 describes an abstraction of the generic image processing system, i.e. a representation of a so-called "digital twin" of the system. It handles the administration of recipes, configurations and results in a standardized way, while the contents remain manufacturer-specific and are treated as a black box.
The demonstrator establishes an infrastructure layer that enables a simplified and uniform integration of all possible image processing systems into higher-level IT production systems (PLC, SCADA, MES, ERP, Cloud, ...). It demonstrates the generalized control of a vision system and abstracts the necessary behavior via the concept of a "state machine".