Fraunhofer IWU is now part of the umati community
What expectations do you have of umati and what do you expect from the partnership?
We at the OPC UA LAB at Fraunhofer IWU want to make production data easily accessible and usable — a vision that we share with umati. As an umati partner, we can exchange ideas even better with companies and research institutions, learn about current trends and challenges and actively help shape them. The topics of future research projects of the OPC UA LAB can be aligned even more closely with the umati strategy through the partnership and the community and generate new collaborations.
Training courses on umati and OPC UA. In this way, umati promotes our research and the competitiveness of our customers in equal measure.
What advantages does umati offer your company and your customers?
Umati offers us as an applied research organisation and our industrial customers clear advantages, above all through the vendor-independence of the umati information models. The standardised models simplify the transferability of software developments so that we can transfer our research results to industry more quickly.
For our customers, umati is a ‘must-have’ for machine data acquisition, as it offers considerable economies of scale in software development and makes productivity gains transferable to other machines. The IWU OPC UA LAB supports this with services such as information modelling, software development and training on umati and OPC UA. In this way, umati promotes our research and the competitiveness of our customers in equal measure.
How do you evaluate the expansion of the umati initiative to the entire mechanical engineering industry?
The entire mechanical engineering sector faces similar challenges in the areas of digitalisation, interoperability and data integration. These similarities make the transfer of proven standards not only sensible, but also necessary in order to meet the requirements of increasingly networked production and remove barriers to market entry.
About Fraunhofer IWU
The Fraunhofer Institute for Machine Tools and Forming Technology IWU is your innovative partner for applied research and development in production technology. With around 670 highly qualified employees at six locations, we develop potential for competitive manufacturing and cover the entire value chain of the factory.
As one of the leading institutes for resource-efficient production, we focus on highly flexible, scalable and cognitive production that learns from nature. The basis for this is production data, which the OPC UA LAB makes accessible and usable for companies. Our experts Carl Willy Mehling and Christian Keilig help to sustainably improve production and offer customised solutions, development and consulting services on the subject of OPC UA.