Powertrain

Scope / Goals

Develop specifications for powertrains. Powertrain stands for a drive system that includes the motor starter, complete drive module (CDM), electric motor and transmission elements. The CDM includes for example a frequency converter with all additional components like electrical infeed, input and output filter etc.
Powertrains can be used in various industrial applications. Everything that has to be moved, turned, lifted or positioned can be converted with drive technology.

Technical Details

Use cases in vertical communication in the field of mechanical and plant engineering serve as orientation for the contents of the OPC UA Companion Specifications for the Powertrain. The aim of the drive technology manufacturers is to enable user-related and intelligent services for the production of the future. The working group is also in contact with other OPC UA groups such as the UA FX Motion WG to ensure good coordination and avoid duplication of work.
The OPC 40400 series provides standardized OPC UA information models for the powertrain. The joint working group, a group of experts from leading drive technology companies, have developed the first Companion Specification OPC 40400-1 which covers the use case asset management.

OPC 40400-1: Asset Management

This specification provides a manufacturer-independent description of the powertrain components (assets) and their associated static data (attributes). The modular structure of the OPC UA information model allows all levels of complexity of a powertrain to be mapped.
In this context, modular means that a basic structure of orderable products/components (hardware and software) of a powertrain has been created (asset types). These asset types serve as containers for the respective properties (catalog data), which are made up of PtAssetAttributesTypes (product-specific data) and PtCommonAssetAttributesTypes (cross-product data).

Fig 1: System boundary of the powertrain

When defining the primary PtAssetType, compatibility with the cross-machinery OPC UA specification OPC UA for Machinery and the specifications in the area of OPC UA Field Level Communications (FLC) was taken into account.

Outlook OPC UA 40400-2

Building on the basic specification OPC 40400-1, work has already begun on a second OPC Companion Specification. This deals with use cases in the field of diagnostics / monitoring and will describe, among other things, dynamic runtime data of a powertrain.