The future OPC UA inter­face for Addit­ive Man­u­fac­tur­ing (UA4AM) is inten­ded to facil­it­ate the exchange of inform­a­tion between an AM machine and soft­ware sys­tems such as MES, SCADA, ERP or data ana­lys­is sys­tems — like OPC 40501 for machine tools.

This will enable addit­ive man­u­fac­tur­ing machines from dif­fer­ent man­u­fac­tur­ers to be effi­ciently integ­rated into exist­ing and new pro­duc­tion land­scapes. AM-spe­cif­ic fea­tures such as just-in-time, on-site and high flex­ib­il­ity in pro­duc­tion net­works are sup­por­ted in this way. The dis­tri­bu­tion and suc­cess­ful use of addit­ive man­u­fac­tur­ing in industry will be pro­moted in this way.

The spe­cific­a­tion will cov­er a sim­il­ar range of use cases as OPC 40501 already does for machine tools. Fur­ther AM-spe­cif­ic para­met­ers such as job and com­pon­ent char­ac­ter­ist­ics, mater­i­al and con­sum­able prop­er­ties and the mater­i­al cycle will be made avail­able at the inter­faces of the systems.

The OPC 40540 and VDMA 40540 was ini­ti­ated by a sub-work­ing group of the VDMA Work­ing Group Addit­ive Man­u­fac­tur­ing with around 200 par­ti­cip­at­ing companies.

Where­as in the VDMA Work­ing Group Addit­ive Man­u­fac­tur­ing the entire pro­cess chain is rep­res­en­ted the scope of the first ver­sion of UA4AM are inter­faces of the print­ing sys­tems only.