Battery Passport Proof of Concept based on OPC UA

04/21/2024

OPC Foundation, CESMII, and VDMA advances existing demonstrator for Product Carbon Footprint and Digital Product Passport with the Battery Passport, modelled with OPC UA

Scottsdale, AZ – April 22nd, 2024 – The OPC Foundation, a global consortium tasked with the development and maintenance of industrial interoperability standards, also develops solutions to fulfill governmental regulations for interoperable systems. This work is carried out in close collaboration with several cooperation partners like CESMII, the VDMA, and the Fraunhofer Research Institution for Battery Cell Production FFB. The Battery Passport has been defined by EU regulators and lists more than 100 parameters to be presented and exchanged between systems. Built on the success of the existing Digital Product Passport (DPP) and Product Carbon Footprint (PCF) demonstrator, utilizing OPC UA for data modelling and information exchange, the OPC Foundation has now extended this demonstrator with the Battery Passport.

“Thanks to the existing eco-system for data modelling and a large collection of free and commercial modelling tools available for OPC UA, the demonstrator can be quickly extended with new requirements for product passports,” says Stefan Hoppe, President OPC Foundation.

In addition, the Battery Passport extension naturally fits into the existing working groups initiative of the OPC Foundation focused on the energy sector, defining OPC UA Information Models. These Information Models can be used for commercial and domestic energy generation and storage. Members of the OPC Foundation, in cooperation with partners like CESMII and VDMA, initiated in 2022 the standardization and harmonization of information exchange in the Energy Transition. OPC UA has proven to be the right technology to standardize the management, operation, and optimization of renewables assets. It is, therefore, not surprising that these companies want to leverage the same proven OPC UA technology to model product passports, like the battery passport.

“The Battery Passport will be a reality for electric vehicles and industrial batteries in less than three years, so time to act is now! OPC UA provides a rich ecosystem of semantic modelling tools that are readily available, so CESMII’s Smart Manufacturing Profiles (and therefore OPC UA), which enable data exchange for supply chains, are the obvious choice to model the Battery Passport,” says John Dyck, CEO of CESMII.

“The EU regulations pose a variety of challenges for the mechanical and plant engineering,” says Hartmut Rauen, Deputy Executive Director, VDMA, and continues: “The exemplary implementation of the Digital Battery Passport with OPC UA is a first important practical implementation how standardized production information can be used and can serve as a blueprint for numerous industries. The OPC UA Companion Specifications, which have been developed in large numbers by the VDMA, form a standardized basis for many EU passports.”

About CESMII
CESMII – the Smart Manufacturing Institute – has a total current investment of $140M (with an additional $61M under negotiation) from Department of Energy funding and public/private partnership contributions, with a mandate to create a more competitive manufacturing environment here in the US through advanced sensing, analytics, modeling, control and platforms. CESMII is one of 17 Manufacturing USA institutes on this mission to increase manufacturing productivity, global competitiveness, and reinvestment by increasing energy productivity, improving economic performance and raising workforce capacity. University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) is the program and administrative home of CESMII.
For more information about CESMII, its history and Smart Manufacturing, visit cesmii.org.


About VDMA:

The VDMA represents 3600 German and European mechanical and plant engineering companies. The industry stands for innovation, export orientation and SMEs. The companies employ around 3 million people in the EU-27, more than 1.2 million of them in Germany alone. This makes mechanical and plant engineering the largest employer among the capital goods industries, both in the EU-27 and in Germany. In the European Union, it represents a turnover volume of an estimated 910 billion euros. Around 80 percent of the machinery sold in the EU comes from a manufacturing plant in the domestic market.
Find out more about VDMA at: www.vdma.com.

About the OPC Foundation
The OPC Foundation has been promoting the development and adoption of the OPC information exchange standard since 1996. As an advocate and steward of these specifications, the OPC Foundation’s mission is to help vendors, end users, and software developers achieve interoperability of their manufacturing and automation resources. The OPC Foundation’s mission is to provide the best specifications, technologies, processes, and certification to ensure interoperability between different vendors and different platforms securely and reliably from embedded systems to the enterprise cloud. The Foundation supports over 980 members from around the world in industrial automation, IT, IoT, IIoT, M2M, Industry 4.0, building automation, machine tools, pharmaceuticals, petrochemical, and smart energy in achieving this goal.
More information: www.opcfoundation.org

Contacts:

Stefan Hoppe
President and Executive Director
OPC Foundation
Stefan.Hoppe@OPCFoundation.org

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