"Cross-industry and cross-technology marketing is a huge step forward for our customers," said Dr. Wilfried Schäfer, Executive Director of the VDW (German Machine Tool Builders' Association), explaining the strategy at the joint press conference held by the two associations in Frankfurt am Main.

"Manufacturing companies not only have machine tools, but also an individual mix of different machines and systems, robots and systems. If all these technologies are part of a common ecosystem that creates plug-and-play solutions, this saves end users a lot of time and money," says Schäfer.

Hartmut Rauen, Deputy Managing Director of the VDMA (German Engineering Federation), adds: "17 trade associations are working on their technology-specific interfaces, the so-called Companion Specifications, in more than 30 groupings. This high level of participation forms the basis for genuine, open interoperability between machines and software systems, from the store floor to the cloud. Only the VDMA has the power to bring together the necessary integration power of the most diverse domains of the production worlds."

OPC UA Companion Specification for Machinery to be published in 2020

The mechanical and plant engineering industry adopted OPC UA as the standard for data exchange at an early stage. This is because OPC UA offers a standardized 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 had to be defined uniformly.

This is why various areas of the VDMA, including electrical drive technology, plastics and rubber machinery, industrial image processing, metallurgy, robotics and machine tools, are working on the OPC UA for Machinery basic companion specification. "The first version will be published this year," announces Rauen, "This foundation will bring speed and compatibility."

Umati appeals to the end customer

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 with 70 partners from ten countries at EMO Hannover 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.

Umati stands for Uuniversal Machine Technology Interface and therefore for interoperable production. It is a brand and a label for a community that has come together to spread the OPC UA standards in machine and plant engineering. It forms a framework for joint marketing, public relations, 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 refer to the latest version of the OPC UA Companion Specification for Machine Tools in future," explains Schäfer.

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 OPC UA standards for everyday use in production to the diverse customer world, the umati showcase will demonstrate the cross-industry use of various OPC UA standards in a practical way.