The OPC 40540 for Addit­ive Man­u­fac­tur­ing is based on the OPC UA for Machine Tools inter­face and takes AM-spe­cif­ic fea­tures into account.

This allows addit­ive man­u­fac­tur­ing machines from dif­fer­ent man­u­fac­tur­ers to be effi­ciently integ­rated into exist­ing and new pro­duc­tion land­scapes. The dif­fer­ent AM tech­no­lo­gies are taken into account in the spe­cific­a­tion and spe­cif­ic fea­tures such as just-in-time, on-site and high flex­ib­il­ity in pro­duc­tion net­works are thus sup­por­ted. The spread and suc­cess­ful use of addit­ive man­u­fac­tur­ing in industry is pro­moted in this way.
The spe­cific­a­tion cov­ers a sim­il­ar spec­trum of use cases to those of OPC 40501 for machine tools. Oth­er AM-spe­cif­ic para­met­ers such as job and com­pon­ent prop­er­ties, mater­i­al and con­sum­able prop­er­ties, and the mater­i­al cycle are made avail­able at the sys­tems’ interfaces.

OPC 40540 and VDMA 40540 were ini­ti­ated by a sub-work­ing group of the VDMA Addit­ive Man­u­fac­tur­ing Work­ing Group with about 200 par­ti­cip­at­ing companies.
The first ver­sion of UA4AM ini­tially only deals with the inter­faces of the print­ing sys­tems. The VDMA Addit­ive Man­u­fac­tur­ing work­ing group cov­ers the entire pro­cess chain, thus also gen­er­at­ing poten­tial for cor­res­pond­ing expan­sion of the Specification.