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The OPC Foundation, focused on ensuring interoperability in automation by creating and maintaining open specifications, and the AutomationML association, targeting the lossless exchange of engineering information along the engineering tool chain, announced the release of the companion specification "AutomationML for OPC UA" to help increase interoperability within smarter factories of the future.
AutomationML is a data exchange standard for engineering data standardized in IEC 62814. It provides a family of standards to make engineering tools more interoperable in order to help decrease costs for data exchange, transforming data from one engineering tool to another, etc.
OPC UA is a family of technologies intended to exchange information between different industrial control systems on different control layers in a standardized fashon. OPC-UA provides technologies to connect field control devices with higher control layers.
Industrie 4.0 and the factory of the future mandate interoperability of devices, machines, controllers and IT systems from different vendors. They must communicate and interact in an efficient way. This requires not only that they can talk to each other, but also that they understand what their counterpart is saying. OPC UA deals with the communication, AutomationML with the content interpretation.
With the combination of AutomationML and OPC UA, it is possible for manufacturers to communicate live and engineering data containing information about the status of, for example, a conveyor as well as about its abilities, which helps the factory to get smarter. Furthermore, the OPC UA system configuration can be transferred to AutomationML models. This helps to reduce manual engineering effort and provide new methodologies to deal with smart data used, for example, for predictive maintenance or data analytics in the factory.
The joint working group of the AutomationML e.V. and the OPC Foundation, which consists of major companies and research institutes from IT and automation, has dealt with this topic since 2014.
The Release Version 1.00.00 of the Companion Specification "AutomationML for OPC UA" was published on February 22, 2016. You can find the specification document and corresponding nodesets and examples on the OPC Foundation Website: https://opcfoundation.org/developer-tools/specifications-unified-architecture/opc-unified-architecture-for-automationml/
Keywords: Industrie 4.0, OPC, Smart Factories, Engineering Data, Industrial Control Systems, ARC Advisory Group.