OPC UA Safety Test Tool for
OPC UA Client/Server certified
OPC UA Safety Compliance Test Tool (UASCTT) Verifies Compliance of OPC UA Safety (Part 10000-015)
Scottsdale, AZ – December 10th, 2025 – The OPC Foundation is proud to announce that the OPC UA Safety Compliance Test Tool (UASCTT) has been officially certified by TÜV SÜD for its conformity in testing OPC UA Safety over Client/Server communications. This milestone marks a key achievement in ensuring reliable and standardized safety communication in industrial automation environments.
The UASCTT, developed under the leadership of IFAK (Institut für Automation und Kommunikation e.V.), plays a critical role in validating implementations of OPC UA Safety, enabling vendors to ensure that their devices meet the stringent requirements of functional safety and interoperability.
Elke Hintze, project manager at IFAK in charge of the tool development on behalf of the OPC Foundation, emphasized the significance of the certification: “The TÜV SÜD certification of the UASCTT confirms the maturity and quality of our toolchain for OPC UA Safety. It provides vendors with a reliable basis for conformity testing and supports the overall goal of harmonized, interoperable safety communication across automation systems.”
OPC UA Safety, standardized as Part 15 (10000-015) of the OPC UA Framework, is the result of OPC Foundation’s Safety Joint Working Group which has been created together with Profibus & Profinet International (PI) in the year 2018. The working group, chaired by Christian Eitner (Siemens), has been instrumental in defining the technical specifications ensuring safety communication independence from underlying transport layers—a key benefit of the “black channel” concept of the transport-agnostic OPC UA standard (IEC 62541).
Christian Eitner, Chair of the Safety JWG, commented: “With TÜV SÜD’s certification of the UASCTT, vendors now have a trusted, high-quality tool to validate their safety communication implementations. This is a major step toward robustness and interoperability across industrial networks, empowering us to now accelerate our collective journey towards an even safer and more connected industrial future.”
Looking ahead, the next development phase will expand the UASCTT’s capabilities to support OPC UA PubSub and OPC UA FX (Field eXchange). Both extensions are integral to the underlying mapper concept within the black channel architecture, allowing OPC UA Safety to seamlessly support future communication paradigms.
Stefan Hoppe, President of the OPC Foundation, added: “The TÜV SÜD certification of the UASCTT is a strong signal to the global automation community that OPC UA Safety is ready for broad adoption. With upcoming support for PubSub and OPC UA FX, we continue to fulfill our vision of a unified, secure, and interoperable communication standard that covers the entire spectrum from sensor to cloud.”
About the OPC Foundation
The OPC Foundation has been promoting the development and adoption of the OPC information exchange standard since 1996. As an advocate and steward of these specifications, the OPC Foundation’s mission is to help vendors, end users, and software developers achieve interoperability of their manufacturing and automation resources. The OPC Foundation’s mission is to provide the best specifications, technologies, processes, and certification to ensure interoperability between different vendors and different platforms securely and reliably from embedded systems to the enterprise cloud. The Foundation supports over 1000 members from around the world in industrial automation, IT, IoT, IIoT, M2M, Industry 4.0, building automation, machine tools, pharmaceuticals, petrochemical, and smart energy in achieving this goal.
More information: www.opcfoundation.org
Contacts:
Peter Lutz
Director Field Level Communications
OPC Foundation
Peter.Lutz@OPCFoundation.org
Stefan Hoppe
President and Executive Director
OPC Foundation
Stefan.Hoppe@OPCFoundation.org
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