VDMA - Mechanical Engineering Industry Association

The VDMA is an advisor, lobbyist, network platform, sparring partner and voice of the mechanical and plant engineering industry – and has been for more than 130 years.
It represents over 3,600 mainly small and medium size member companies in the engineering industry, making it one of the largest and most important industrial associations in Europe. Regional individuality and international orientation are valuable characteristics that make the association particularly attractive for its members in the machinery and equipment manufacturing industry.

VDMA coordinates the activities of multiple OPC joint working groups that define a common, cross-industry language between machines and systems. See VDMA working groups.

Position to OPC UA

Alexander Jakschik, VDMA Vice-President
“OPC UA is a key open standard that enables flexible and manufacturer-independent communication between machines in Industry 4.0 environments. It allows systems to be connected and reconfigured easily using plug & work principles. To support this, VDMA collaborates with its members to create OPC UA Companion Specifications tailored to specific industries. These specifications form a unified language for machines across sectors. VDMA coordinates around 40 working groups to ensure consistent and standardized communication in intelligent, networked production.“

Andreas Faath, VDMA Managing Director Machine Information Interoperability,
OPC board member for VDMA
“OPC UA is the only interoperability solution that is widely adopted and fulfilling the requirements of the mechanical engineering industry. Therefor VDMA and OPC Foundation joined forces to develop “The Global Production Language” to standardize the semantics of shop-floor information based on OPC UA.”