To help standardize the development of smart factories, the OPC Foundation and the AutomationML association have jointly developed a new specification, the Automation ML for OPC UA (Unified Architecture).

OPC UA deals with communication requirements and automationML with content interpretation.OPC UA is a family of communication technologies developed to facilitate the exchange of information between different control systems on different layers. AutomationML (Automation Markup Language) is a family of data-exchange standards that ease the transfer of engineering data--between CAD systems, for example.

The new version 1.00.00 of the AutomationML for OPC UA specification is intended to help manufacturers achieve interoperability. It describes how to model and transmit AutomationML-based information sets using the OPC UA information model. OPC UA deals with the communication aspects, AutomationML with the content interpretation. Combining AutomationML with OPC UA will allow companies, with a minimal amount of manual engineering effort, to deal with and analyze smart data. Among potential applications (noted by the groups) in a smart-factory setting is predictive maintenance.

Dr. Miriam Schleipen, from Fraunhofer IOSB, is leading the working group that developed the specification, and says, “Industry 4.0 and the factory of the future will require devices, machines, controllers and IT systems from different vendors to interoperate with each other. Not only must they be able to talk to each other, but also understand what each other are saying.”