70 companies from 10 countries have connected 110 machines and 28 value-added services at EMO Hannover 2019 via the OPC UA based umati standard Interface
Scottsdale, AZ – Sept, 16th, 2019 – The OPC Foundation announces the OPC UA based unified machine tool interface (umati) Standard demonstrated at the EMO Hannover show. Created and prototyped by seventeen machine builders and the VDW, the umati demonstration will facilitate context rich communications between 110 machines and 28 software solutions from 70 vendors based out of 10 different countries. Unprecedented in scale, the demonstration will showcase seamless use of multi-vendor machine data by end-user applications using OPC UA connectivity and information modeling (companion specifications).
Beyond moving data between machines and applications for production purposes, the umati companion specification preserves the context of the machine data and standardizes how it is expressed. This consistent semantic representation enables rapid development of meaningful dashboards, HMI displays, and reports from multivendor systems. Something businesses using control automation have strived for over the past 30 years.
Dr. Alexander Broos, umati project manager and Head of Research and Technology explained umati has also already made a strong impression internationally. Three international consortia from major machine tool manufacturing countries have joined the interface: ProdNet from Switzerland, Edgecross from Japan and NCLink from China. In addition, the machine tool associations from China, the United Kingdom, Italy, the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, Spain and Taiwan as well as the European machine tool association Cecimo are supporting the project.
“umati is opening up a new chapter in production,” says Dr. Heinz-Jürgen Prokop, Chairman of the VDW (Verein Deutscher Werkzeugmaschinenhersteller – German Machine Tool Builders’ Association). “Choosing the OPC UA standard as a basis for the development of the interface supports international dissemination. It ensures that umati can be used free of charge worldwide,” explains Prokop. 90 companies are contributing to the standardization work in the Joint Working Group together with the OPC Foundation. The release of Version 1.0 of the Companion Specification, the next milestone, is planned for the middle of next year.
Stefan Hoppe, President and Executive Director OPC Foundation said “The work the umati group did and continues to do stands out in two key ways: First, the working group brought together an impressive number of multi-national companies that traditionally worked in a siloed fashion. The OPC Foundation applauds this approach because standards based on such a global collaborations minimize market confusion about what standard to invest in and maximize the value of the resulting standard.” Mr. Hoppe continued “Second, the umati group’s focus on clearly defining the end-user value its standard brings first and describing the technical benefits of the underlying technologies (like OPC UA) second is a good example of how companion specification workgroups can capture market attention and maximize demand and adoption of the standards they put out.”
About umati
Universal machine tool interface is an industry initiative of the VDW. It was set up in 2017 by the companies Chiron, DMG Mori, Emag, Grob, Heller, Liebherr-Verzahntechnik, Trumpf and United Grinding. Its goal is to achieve an open standard for data exchange based on the global interoperability standard OPC UA. It also defines all necessary framework conditions to ensure seamless and secure integration of customers’ machines and software. The ultimate goal of the umati brand is to provide international visibility and support its partners’ marketing and quality assurance efforts. The standardisation activities of the Joint Working Group set up with the OPC Foundation are now followed by almost 100 companies all over the world.
www.umati.info
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 to 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 700 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 https://newwebsite.opcfoundation.org.
For more information, contact:
Stefan Hoppe, President and Executive Director
OPC Foundation
Stefan.Hoppe@OPCfoundation.org
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