The OPC Foundation, in conjunction with the MTConnect Institute, announce the release of the jointly developed “OPC Unified Architecture for MTConnect Companion Specification Part 1”. This companion specification makes the MTConnect semantic information model for machine tools accessible to a global audience leveraging the OPC UA Service Oriented Architecture. This OPC UA MTConnect Companion Specification incorporates all the features and functions of the XML based MTConnect standard.
The MTConnect OPC UA Companion Specification expresses the MTConnect stream and device information models via the OPC UA modeling language. This brings the benefits of data type enforcement, separation of the information model definition from its implementation, and improved MTConnect security via OPC UA end-to-end security.
“Critical manufacturing data needs both semantic definitions from MTConnect and the protocol and security features of OPC UA,” said MTConnect Institute President Douglas K. Woods. “This specification will benefit the large and growing user bases of both OPC and MTConnect by improving interoperability between the standards and the devices using them.”
Stefan Hoppe, President and Executive Director of the OPC Foundation commented, “With the release of this [OPC UA MTConnect] companion specification, the MTConnect Institute joins a growing community of standards bodies using OPC UA as the basis for their specifications. Beyond empowering end-users and vendors with the ability to leverage the technical benefits of using OPC UA, these standards bodies are increasingly collaborating to harmonize overlapping OPC UA based information models for improved interoperability. This is a key pre-requisite for implementing and harnessing the full value of the IIoT and I4.0 in the near future.”