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OPC 40501 UA for Machine Tools

The OPC 40501 series addresses use cases and para­meters specifically for machine tools.

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 provides 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 a bid­irec­tion­al exchange of inform­a­tion and files like job data, NC pro­grams and tool man­age­ment data to and from a con­nec­ted machine tool.

umati provides resources on how to imple­ment UA4MT uni­formly at umati.org/dev

Part 1 cov­ers these use cases:

  • Identi­fy machines of dif­fer­ent manufacturers
  • Over­view of wheth­er pro­duc­tion is running
  • Over­view of parts in a job
  • Over­view of runtimes for a job
  • Over­view of machine tool state
  • Over­view of upcom­ing manu­al activities
  • Over­view of errors and warnings
  • Provid­ing inform­a­tion for KPI calculations
  • Provid­ing an over­view of tool data
  • Provid­ing OPC UA for Machinery Use Cases
    • Machinery State (OPC 40001–1)
    • Job Man­age­ment (OPC 40001–3)
    • How to use File­Trans­fer in the con­text of Machinery/Machine Tools

OPC 40501–1 and VDMA 40501–1 was ini­ti­ated by a work­ing group of VDW, the Ger­man Machine Tool Build­ers‘ Asso­ci­ation. It was cre­ated by a Joint Work­ing Group between VDW and the OPC Found­a­tion, com­pris­ing over 90 com­pan­ies and almost 200 par­ti­cipants from all around the world.