OPC Foundation Advances Open, Standards-Based, Digital Product Passport Adoption from Shop Floor to Cloud

04/20/2026

Fraunhofer FFB demonstrates digital battery cell production in Germany with the EU Battery Passport based on OPC UA

Scottsdale, AZ – April 20th, 2026 – The OPC Foundation today reaffirmed its commitment to enabling the next generation of Digital Product Passport (DPP) solutions with open, interoperable, and standards-based technologies that connect product data seamlessly across the full product lifecycle, from industrial devices and manufacturing systems to cloud and enterprise platforms. The DPP is emerging as a foundational capability for the circular economy, enabling transparent, verifiable, and structured access to product-related information, such as origin, sustainability attributes, carbon footprint, material composition, performance, service history, and end-of-life guidance. In Europe, the Digital Battery Passport is the first major DPP implementation and is expected to serve as a model for many additional product categories. During Hannover Messe, the Fraunhofer Research Institution for Battery Cell Production (FFB), as lead of the Battery Solutions Joint Working Group, in collaboration with Catena-X, IDSA, IDTA, OPC Foundation, VDA, and VDMA, presents a demonstrator to showcase interoperability between several solutions for the EU Digital Battery Passport.

The OPC Foundation has also entered into a Liaison Agreement with CEN and CENELEC, through which it actively contributes to CEN/CENELEC JTC 24 DPP Framework and System. This collaboration brings OPC Foundation expertise directly into the European standardization process and supports the development of system-agnostic, vendor-independent, and interoperable DPP solutions. By contributing OPC UA’s semantic modeling and interoperability capabilities, the OPC Foundation is helping ensure that DPP implementations are built on open and future-proof standards that work across industries, products, and technology stacks.

Building on this work, the OPC Foundation is among the first organizations to provide an end-to-end, open-source approach for DPPs. This approach combines OPC UA information modeling, the UA Cloud Library, automated conversion of DPP templates from various sources into OPC UA nodesets, and an OPC UA-enabled DPP repository workflow. Together, these components make it possible to create, host, exchange, and integrate standards-based DPPs using openly available tools and services, accelerating adoption while maintaining compliance with emerging market and regulatory requirements.

The OPC Foundation’s DPP work builds on practical implementations already demonstrated in the battery domain. In 2024, the OPC Foundation extended its existing DPP and Product Carbon Footprint demonstrator to include the Battery Passport, in collaboration with industry partners including Fraunhofer Research Institution for Battery Cell Production FFB, CESMII, and VDMA. That work established an important real-world blueprint for how standardized production information can be transformed into a practical, interoperable DPP solution using OPC UA.

Today, that momentum is continuing into battery production. Fraunhofer FFB is integrating this approach into its battery production digitalization work, connecting shop floor data to Digital Battery Passport workflows. At Hannover Messe 2026, Fraunhofer FFB and OPC Foundation ecosystem partners are demonstrating how OPC UA production data can be integrated directly into a turnkey DPP solution, illustrating how standards-based DPPs can be implemented in manufacturing environments.

“Interoperability is key to scaling the Digital Battery Passport. Our work shows that open standards like OPC UA enable a seamless, vendor-independent path from production to data space ecosystems.” said Dr. Arno Schmetz, Fraunhofer FFB, Lead of the joint working group ‘Battery Solutions’.

“Digital Product Passports will only scale if they are based on open standards, are generated automatically, and have real interoperability,” said Stefan Hoppe, President of the OPC Foundation. “The OPC Foundation is committed to ensuring that manufacturers, software providers, and ecosystem partners can implement DPP solutions quickly, cost-effectively, and in full alignment with emerging European and global requirements.”

“By linking semantic information models, standardized interfaces, and open-source implementations, we are enabling a practical path from machine data to regulatory and value-chain transparency,” said Erich Barnstedt, Chair of the OPC Foundation Cloud Initiative. “This is exactly the kind of foundation needed to support DPP adoption across industries.”

With these activities, the OPC Foundation is helping industry move beyond concept and toward implementation, offering a practical, standards-based path for DPPs that is open, scalable, and ready for cross-company data exchange.

For more information, or interest to join the group, visit

About the OPC Foundation
Since 1996, the OPC Foundation has facilitated the development and adoption of the OPC information exchange standards. As both advocate and custodian of these specifications, the Foundation’s mission is to help industry vendors, end-users, and software developers maintain interoperability in their manufacturing and automation assets. The OPC Foundation is dedicated providing the best specifications, technology, process, and certification to achieve multivendor, multiplatform, secure, reliable interoperability for moving data and information from the embedded world to the enterprise cloud. The Foundation serves over 1010 members worldwide in the Industrial Automation, IT, IoT, IIoT, M2M, Industrie 4.0, Building Automation, machine tools, pharmaceutical, petrochemical, and Smart Energy sectors. For more information about the OPC Foundation, please visit http://www.opcfoundation.org .

For more information, contact:

Stefan Hoppe
OPC Foundation

Stefan.Hoppe@opcfoundation.org

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