The VDMA OPC Machine Vis­ion Ini­ti­at­ive, launched in Janu­ary 2016, released Part 1 of the OPC Machine Vis­ion Com­pan­ion Spe­cific­a­tion in 2019, and Part 2 was released in 2024. As a Joint Work­ing Group, the ini­ti­at­ive is organ­ized by VDMA Robot­ics + Auto­ma­tion and sup­por­ted by the OPC Foundation.

The core work­ing group that is devel­op­ing the spe­cific­a­tion con­sists of 17 experts from 10 com­pan­ies. Due to the enorm­ous vari­ations in machine vis­ion sys­tems all over the world, it is very hard to gen­er­al­ize vis­ion sys­tem data. There­fore Part 1 focuses on data man­age­ment meth­ods without restrict­ing the con­tent of the same. Beha­vi­or con­trol and obser­va­tion of a vis­ion sys­tem are the key object­ives addressed in Part 1. The gen­er­ic state machine approach intro­duced in Part 1 of the spe­cific­a­tion enables mon­it­or­ing and con­trol of sys­tem behavior.

The ini­ti­at­ive is cur­rently con­clud­ing the devel­op­ment of Part 2 of the spe­cific­a­tion which aims to define a gen­er­ic struc­ture and the com­pon­ents of a machine vis­ion sys­tem. It describes the rela­tion­ship between the com­pon­ents and their con­di­tion mon­it­or­ing parameters.

Part 1 describes the func­tion­al­ity of a machine vis­ion sys­tem and cov­ers these use cases:

• Con­fig­ur­a­tion Management
• Recipe Man­age­ment
• Res­ult Management
• Safety State Management
• Machine vis­ion sys­tem state with state machines

Part 2 describes the struc­ture of a machine vis­ion sys­tem, its com­pon­ents and the rela­tion­ships between them and cov­ers these use cases:

• Iden­ti­fic­a­tion of the sys­tem and its components
• Con­di­tion Monitoring
• Rela­tion­ship between components
• Future-proof inform­a­tion mod­el to allow integ­ra­tion of future detailed Com­pan­ion Spe­cific­a­tions for the com­pon­ents of a machine vis­ion system