"We are proud to be one of the pioneers in the field of OPC UA. A great deal of work has gone into this and the success is based on the extraordinary commitment of the members of the OPC Machine Vision Core Working Group," says Dr. Horst Heinol-Heikkinen, Managing Director of Asentics and board member of VDMA Robotics + Automation and VDMA Machine Vision.

On behalf of the OPC Foundation, Stefan Hoppe, President and CEO of the OPC Foundation, praised the success of the working group: "The OPC Foundation greatly appreciates the work of the VDMA Machine Vision initiative. Machine vision has taken a decisive step towards the implementation of Industry 4.0. It has introduced OPC UA as an interoperability platform for machine vision and promoted the spirit of cooperation on a global level through the international standardization cooperation G3.

Back in January 2016, the VDMA Machine Vision Executive Board decided to develop an OPC UA Companion Specification for machine vision. A core working group of 17 experts from leading European machine vision companies took up the challenge, making suggestions for approach and content and monitoring feedback from the wider machine vision industry and end users worldwide.

To achieve a wider reach, VDMA Machine Vision decided to bring this important standardization work into the global machine vision standardization cooperation called G3. G3 consists of the globally active American (AIA), Chinese (CMVU), European (VDMA and EMVA) and Japanese (JIIA) machine vision associations. "The machine vision community worldwide had the opportunity to participate in the content of the OPC UA Machine Vision Companion Specifications - which will now lead to broad acceptance of the new standard," says Dr. Heinol-Heikkinen.

Download and details of the OPC UA Companion Specification Part 1

Part 1 describes an abstraction of the generic vision system, i.e. a representation of a so-called digital twin of the system. It takes over the management of recipes, configurations and results in a standardized way, while the contents remain manufacturer-specific and are treated as a black box. It also enables the generalized control of a vision system and abstracts the necessary behaviour via the concept of a 'state machine'. A test implementation has already been successfully completed and was presented at a major automotive industry event in Germany in May 2019. A hardware demonstrator is currently being developed and will soon be on display at trade fairs in Germany. And, as the addition 'Part 1' shows: The work of the VDMA OPC Machine Vision Initiative does not stop here. Part 1 also establishes a kind of infrastructure layer that enables simplified and standardized integration of all possible machine vision systems into higher-level IT production systems (PLC, SCADA, MES, ERP, cloud, ...). The aim is to go beyond Part 1 by breaking down other proprietary elements and replacing them with standardized information structures and semantics such as configuration, recipe and result information.

The publication of the OPC UA Machine Vision Companion Specification Part 1, which is now available for download on the OPC Foundation website and also on the VDMA website, marks the end of a total of 35 days of face-to-face meetings, around 50 online meetings and countless hours of individual work by the working group.