Scottsdale, AZ, April 24th 2018 – The MTConnect Institute and the OPC Foundation have formed a Joint Working Group (JWG) to update and revise the MTConnect-OPC UA (Unified Architecture) Companion specification. “The existing MTConnect-OPC UA companion specification established a uniform information model for integrating the two standards,” said Tim Shinbara, Secretary of the MTConnect Institute and Vice President of Technology at AMT–The Association For Manufacturing Technology. “Both standards have been enthusiastically embraced in the industry, and a shared philosophy of interoperable standards is more important now than ever.”
The MTConnect communications standard enables manufacturing equipment to provide structured, contextualized data with no proprietary format. The OPC UA standard provides secure, reliable, high-speed communications, developed as a collaboration of the leading worldwide automation suppliers. The OPC Unified Architecture (UA), released in 2008, is a platform independent service-oriented architecture that integrates all the functionality of the individual OPC Classic specifications into one extensible framework.
“The MTConnect-OPC UA companion standard will allow the extensive existing information model provided by MTConnect to be leveraged by existing OPC UA Systems at the enterprise level,” said Tom Burke, OPC Foundation President and Executive Director.
The MTConnect Institute and OPC Foundation have had a memorandum of understanding in place since September 2010, which was revised in January 2018 to reflect the Joint Working Group. The joint working group creates a robust mechanism for OPC and MTConnect to extend the reach of the existing manufacturing data exchange standards, information models, and implementation technologies.
Manufacturers have begun to rapidly embrace open, standards-based communication architectures for factory data, which in turn drove demand for the companion specification. “This revision will expand and update the shared, uniform information model to reflect updates to the two standards,” said Paul Hunkar, President of DSInteroperability and co-chairman of the JWG.
The MTConnect Institute
The MTConnect Institute is a 501(c)(6) not-for-profit standards development organization responsible for the MTConnect standard and related materials. The Institute includes a Board of Directors, Technical Advisory Group (TAG), working groups under the TAG, and Technical Steering Committee.
Find more information here www.MTConnect.org
About OPC Foundation
The OPC Foundation is a nonprofit international standards organization dedicated to developing and maintaining the best specifications, technology and certification to achieve multivendor, multiplatform, secure, reliable information from embedded devices to the cloud. OPC Foundation started in 1995, and the OPC community is grown to over 4200 different companies building OPC products with over 47,000,000 installations. OPC specifications are available without membership and OPC reference implementations are open sourced on GitHub. The foundation has an open certification program enabling members and nonmembers to certify their products.
Find more information here: www.opcfoundation.org
About OPC UA
OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA) is a platform and vendor independent communication technology for a secure and reliable data exchange over the different levels of the automation pyramid. In addition, the information models of the OPC UA standard provide the foundation for a semantic interoperability.
Find more information about MTConnect & OPC UA working group here: https://opcfoundation.org/markets-collaboration/mtconnect/
Contact
Russ Waddell, Managing Director, MTConnect Institute
eMail: RWaddell@amtonline.org
Stefan Hoppe, Global Vice President, OPC Foundation
eMail: stefan.hoppe@opcfoundation.org
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