The VDMA Indus­tri­al Join­ing Tech­no­lo­gies ini­ti­at­ive, launched in May 2019, released Part 1 of the OPC 40451–1 Tight­en­ing Com­pan­ion Spe­cific­a­tion in 2021, and Part 2 will be released in 2022/2023. As a joint work­ing group, the ini­ti­at­ive is organ­ized by VDMA Integ­rated Assembly 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 along with com­mon ele­ments at the join­ing level.

The core work­ing group that is devel­op­ing the spe­cific­a­tion con­sists of 15+ experts from 9 companies.

The fol­low­ing are the use cases covered in Release 1, pub­lished in Octo­ber 2021:

Asset Man­age­ment

• Over­view and iden­ti­fic­a­tion of the asset

Res­ult Management

• Stand­ard defin­i­tion of Res­ult which is com­mon for vari­ous join­ing technologies.
• Tight­en­ing Res­ult con­tain­ing Steps, Traces and Errors.
• Stand­ard inter­face to access Res­ults using Event, Meth­ods, AddressSpace.

Basic Events

• Gen­er­ic event with cus­tom­ized mes­sage and Res­ult event with payload.

Upcom­ing Releases:

• Cre­ate a join­ing spe­cific­a­tion to har­mon­ize vari­ous join­ing technologies.
• Cov­er addi­tion­al use cases such as
  — Con­sol­id­ated Result
  — Har­mon­iz­a­tion of Asset and Res­ult models
  — Com­pre­hens­ive Event Model
  — Joints
  — Future-proof inform­a­tion model
  — Pro­gram, Pro­cess, Parts
  — Integ­ra­tion of har­mon­ized loc­a­tion model
  — Future-proof inform­a­tion mod­el through use of flex­ible mod­el­ing approach with required semantics and rules.

The mem­bers of the ini­ti­at­ive are:

• Atlas Copco
• Cleco
• CSP
• Deprag
• Desout­ter
• Rexroth
• SCS Concept Group
• Weber
• Xitaso