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OPC UA 40450/40451 for
Industrial Joining Technologies

OPC 40450 is the base specification for creating a common OPC UA interface for various joing technologies.

OPC 40451 is the first Companion Specification for Tightening - a specific joining technology.

The VDMA Indus­tri­al Join­ing Tech­no­lo­gies (IJT) ini­ti­at­ive, launched in May 2019, aims to stand­ard­ize com­mu­nic­a­tion inter­faces for vari­ous join­ing tech­no­lo­gies such as Tight­en­ing, Glu­ing, Riv­et­ing, Press­ing, etc. In Octo­ber 2021, the ini­ti­at­ive released OPC 40451 1.00.0 Tight­en­ing Sys­tem Com­pan­ion Spe­cific­a­tion, which focused spe­cific­ally on tight­en­ing applications.

Build­ing on this found­a­tion, Release 2 was pub­lished in March 2024, expand­ing the scope to cov­er a broad­er range of use cases through two spe­cific­a­tions: OPC 40450 ver­sion 1.00.0 Join­ing Sys­tem Base Com­pan­ion Spe­cific­a­tion, and an updated ver­sion of OPC 40451
ver­sion 2.00.0 Tight­en­ing Sys­tem Com­pan­ion Spe­cific­a­tion. Togeth­er, these spe­cific­a­tions address the most com­mon require­ments across vari­ous join­ing technologies.

The IJT ini­ti­at­ive is a Joint Work­ing Group organ­ized by VDMA Auto­mated Solu­tions and sup­por­ted by the OPC Found­a­tion. The aim of the ini­ti­at­ive is to cre­ate stand­ard inter­faces for join­ing tech­no­lo­gies such as Tight­en­ing, Riv­et­ing, Glu­ing, Press­ing etc. The first release of the ini­ti­at­ive was to cov­er the spe­cif­ic Tight­en­ing use cases. The core work­ing group that is devel­op­ing the spe­cific­a­tion con­sists of 15+ experts from 13+ companies.

The fol­low­ing use cases are covered:

Asset Man­age­ment and Con­di­tion Monitoring
• Over­view and iden­ti­fic­a­tion, mon­it­or­ing of an asset
• Set of meth­ods to man­age an asset
Example: Enable Asset, Dis­con­nect Asset, etc.

Res­ult Management
• Stand­ard defin­i­tion of the Res­ult includ­ing Steps, Traces, Errors
• Stand­ard access to Res­ult using Events, Meth­ods and AddressSpace

Event Man­age­ment
• Stand­ard event and con­di­tion pay­load from a join­ing system
• Stand­ard set of con­di­tion classes to cat­egor­ize or fil­ter vari­ous types of events from a join­ing system

Join­ing Pro­cess Management
• Set of meth­ods and data types to man­age a join­ing pro­cess. Example: Select Pro­cess, etc.

Joint Man­age­ment
• Set of meth­ods and data types to man­age a joint. Example: Send Joint, Select Joint, etc.