The aim is to cre­ate a com­mon inter­face among machine tools of dif­fer­ent tech­no­lo­gies, man­u­fac­tur­ers and mod­el series.

The first part of the OPC UA for Machine Tools Com­pan­ion Spe­cific­a­tion series provides the basics for such an inter­face. This allows for mon­it­or­ing of the machine tool and includes a job mon­it­or­ing and man­age­ment inter­face. This inform­a­tion is provided in a way that is not spe­cif­ic to a par­tic­u­lar tech­no­logy. The OPC UA for Machine Tools inter­face facil­it­ates the exchange of inform­a­tion between a machine tool and soft­ware sys­tems like MES, SCADA, ERP or data ana­lyt­ics systems.

The Machine Tool Com­pan­ion Spe­cific­a­tion provides the har­mon­ized uses cases and inform­a­tion defined by OPC UA for Machinery, espe­cially the machine states. They serve as the basis for the exten­ded KPI Mon­it­or­ing facets to enable cal­cu­la­tions based on ISO 22400 KPI defin­i­tions. With the update to ver­sion 1.02 the cru­cial new Machinery use case for Job Man­age­ment was added. This now enables the bid­irec­tion­al exchange of inform­a­tion and files like job data, NC pro­grams and tool man­age­ment data to and from a con­nec­ted machine tool.