A message from the German Machine Tool Builders' Association (VDMA) and the German Engineering Federation (VDW).
VDMA and VDW want to jointly promote the use and dissemination of OPC UA standards for the entire mechanical engineering industry under the umati brand. The mechanical and plant engineering industry committed to OPC UA as the standard for data exchange at an early stage. This is because OPC UA offers a uniform framework for interoperability between machines and systems. Using a bottom-up approach, it became clear that basic elements for a large part of the diverse product range in mechanical and plant engineering needed to be defined in a standardized way. The simplest example is machine identification, i.e. features such as manufacturer, serial number, year of manufacture and machine type.
This is why various areas within the VDMA, including electrical drive technology, plastics and rubber machinery, industrial image processing, metallurgy, robotics and machine tools, are working on the basic companion specification OPC UA for Machinery.
The machine tool industry was also at the forefront of this process. An initiative to develop a standardized, open interface was presented back in 2017. Here too, OPC UA was quickly chosen as the basic technology. Just two years later, a showcase at EMO Hannover with 70 partners from ten countries proved that the connection of 110 machines to 28 software services, which were distributed decentrally across the exhibition grounds, works practically via "plug and play". In addition, the VDW launched the umati - universal machine tool interface - brand back in 2018, which can be used to address customers worldwide.
In the meantime, numerous other OPC UA Companion Specifications have been created within the VDMA and its partner organizations. In order to give these more visibility and make them even more widely used, umati is now being extended to the entire mechanical and plant engineering sector as a community for the use and marketing of OPC UA Companion Specifications.
The new name is umati - universal machine technology interface and stands for the performance promise of interoperable production. Umati is a brand and a label for a community that has come together to promote the OPC UA standards in machine and plant engineering. It forms a framework for joint marketing, public relations work, demonstrating use cases and addressing end customers. The basis for this is the actual OPC UA interface standardization in various branches of mechanical and plant engineering. "For machine tool manufacturing, we will therefore be referring to the latest version of the OPC UA Companion Specification for Machine Tools in future," explains Wilfried Schäfer from the VDW.
The next steps include the further optimization of the respective Companion Specifications as well as the dissemination of the respective standards and the development of showcases at trade fairs. In order to demonstrate the suitability of the OPC UA standards for everyday use in production to the diverse customer world, the umati showcase will provide a practical demonstration of the cross-industry use of various OPC UA standards.
www.vdma.org/www.vde.de
