Overview
Currently, around 40 working groups in the VDMA are working on OPC UA Companion Specifications, and more than 600 companies in the industry are involved in the creation process.
OPC UA for Machinery Building Blocks is a central harmonization effort for joint working groups with VDMA. It is a basic specification for the entire mechanical and plant engineering industry. On the one hand, it is to be used as a basis for existing and emerging companion specifications. On the other hand, machinery or equipment in mechanical engineering can use the contents of the specification if there is not yet a standardized OPC UA interface in their own industry.
The intention of the working group is not to define one information model, but continuously work on generalized concepts in the area of machinery in order to harmonize the usage of OPC UA in the context of the mechanical engineering industry.
Here, “machine” means any piece of equipment that converts energy (e.g., electricity, steam, gas, human power, pressure) to mechanical movements, heat, electrical signals, pressure etc. to do a particular job in an industrial scenario.
Use Cases
- Machine identification
- Component Identification
- Finding all machines in a server
- Finding all components of a machine
- Machine Status
- Job Management
- Result Transfer
- Energy Monitoring
There are more topics that will be started in the future. These are defined via the roadmap, which is dynamically adapted to the needs of the domain-specific working groups. Some examples are:
- Tool Management
- Skills & Capabilities
- Operating Resource Management
- …
More Information
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