Global Positioning

Scope / Goals

Develop an OPC UA Information Model to define geometric positioning in space – both locally and globally.
This creates a seamless bridge across production, intralogistics, and logistics environments, enabling continuous tracking from manufacturing to distribution. The specification also ensures that location data from omlox systems – the open, technology-independent positioning standard – can be natively integrated into the OPC UA ecosystem and enriched with contextual information or metadata.

Background

Modern industrial applications increasingly require the ability to correlate local spatial data with globally referenced coordinates. For example, asset tracking, multi-site logistics, and remote monitoring benefit from a seamless highly precise transformation between the local coordinate system of a manufacturing environment and geographic locations in navigation and mapping. The extension defined herein introduces new data types, object models, and reference relationships – most notably the GlobalPositionType, GlobalLocationType and ZoneType – that capture parameters such as latitude, longitude, elevation, and positional accuracy in a global context and allow for a precise transformation between the coordinate systems.

This extension ensures that systems built on OPC UA can reliably exchange and interpret position information, regardless of whether it originates from a local or global coordinate system. It thereby enables a coherent and interoperable approach to managing spatial data across both local and global domains within industrial environments.

Technical Information

The specification enables the alignment of local Cartesian coordinates (XYZ), such as those used in indoor environments, with global geo-referenced coordinates (e.g., WGS84/GPS). This allows a unified view of both stationary and mobile assets across production, intralogistics, and logistics.

Its data model is aligned with the OPC UA Companion Specification “Relative Spatial Location”, ensuring smooth interaction between stationary robotics and mobile systems such as AGVs and AMRs.

By establishing a common spatial understanding in 3D – on both local and global levels, the specification also lays the foundation for linking virtual simulations and digital twins with real-world production setups, closing the loop from design to operations.

Use-Cases

Initial use cases focus on asset tracking scenarios, such as maintenance and efficiency improvements for mobile equipment, before extending to more advanced cross-domain applications.