Catena-X

Catena-X is the first end-to-end, muti-tier collaborative and open data ecosystem for the automotive industry, connecting all players along the value chain. The Catena-X association acts as a neutral governance to enable standardized, interoperable, and data-sovereign collaboration, as well as to drive innovation, increase efficiency and compliance across the entire data ecosystem. Catena-X is compliant with international data space standards and serves as a model for all Manufacturing-X initiatives by shaping the development of standardized data ecosystems in other industries. Founded in 2021, the association has hubs in the USA, China, Spain, Sweden and France, with more than 300 individuals from various players in the automotive industry, working in more than 40 expert groups to develop future standards.

Position to OPC UA

Catena-X and OPC Foundation Join Forces to Enable Seamless Industrial Data Exchange for the Digital Product Passport
The Catena-X Automotive Network e. V. and the OPC Foundation have announced a strategic collaboration to accelerate standardized, cross-company data sharing across the manufacturing industry. The partnership focuses on supporting the upcoming EU regulation requiring a Digital Product Passport (DPP) by 2027, which demands trusted, machine-readable product data across entire value chains.

This cooperation brings together two powerful ecosystems:

• Catena-X, the first open, globally trusted and collaborative data space for the automotive industry, offering multi-tier collaboration via enabling sovereign, standardized data-sharing, based on interoperable infrastructure and semantic templates, and
• OPC Foundation, the largest organization for industrial interoperability and the creator of OPC UA, the internationally recognized standard for secure and semantically enriched information exchange.

By aligning OPC UA’s proven industrial modelling capabilities with the governance framework and cloud-based infrastructure of Catena-X, the two organizations aim to simplify data integration, reduce reporting errors, and enhance compliance with emerging regulatory demands like the DPP.

The parties agree to cooperate in the following four core areas:

• Semantic Integration: Combine the OPC UA information modelling and Catena-X semantic templates to create the most comprehensive repository of interoperable, machine-readable models. This technology backbone will also support automated DPP generation from production data.
• Open-Source Reference Implementations: Jointly develop and provide open-source reference implementations for key dataspace and interoperability components, enabling straightforward integration of OPC UA-based systems into the Catena-X data ecosystem.
• Reference Architecture Alignment: Align the OPC Foundation’s Cloud Initiative reference architecture with Catena-X’s dataspace architecture to enable streamlined deployment from the shopfloor to the supply chain.
• Industrial Ecosystem Enablement: Empower companies to leverage their existing OPC UA tools and infrastructure to meet emerging regulatory requirements, particularly the DPP, while reducing integration costs and accelerating time-to-compliance.

Download the OPCF Catena-X Whitepaper here