The OPC Foundation will officially participate in the work of the joint CEN/CENELEC Technical Committee JTC 24 "Digital Product Passport - Framework and System". The agreement is open-ended and linked to the organization's ongoing participation in the relevant working groups.

The focus is on the coordination of data modeling technologies and the development of interoperable, system-independent solutions for the digital product passport (DPP). These should be scalable from embedded systems to cloud and enterprise environments.

OPC UA as the basis for interoperable data models

The central technical building block is OPC UA. The standard is established in automation, primarily for secure information transport, but also offers functions for semantic information modeling. These capabilities are to be used and expanded as part of the collaboration in order to provide standardized data models and interfaces for the digital product passport.

The aim is a trustworthy, semantically structured data exchange across industry-specific data spaces. The aim is to take regulatory requirements into account and enable scalable implementations. According to the agreement, the integration extends to connecting the store floor level via OPC UA-capable embedded systems as data sources for DPP information.

Interoperability as a standardization objective

Otto Handle, Convenor of CEN/CENELEC/JTC 24 WG4 - Digital Product Passport - Interoperability, explained: "One goal of JTC 24's standardization work is interoperability across all system boundaries. The European Commission's standardization mandate clearly states that the Digital Product Passport must be system-agnostic and manufacturer-independent. Integration and interoperability with the complete DPP system must be possible for every software and every system in accordance with these standards. Therefore, we explicitly welcome the OPC Foundation in this liaison and look forward to modeling DPPs with OPC UA and integrating the specified JTC-24 APIs and data models - including connecting the store floor level via OPC UA-enabled embedded systems as DPP data sources."

Erich Barnstedt, Liaison Officer of the OPC Foundation and representative of Microsoft, added:
"This liaison ensures that Digital Product Passports are built on truly open, standardized and interoperable foundations. By bringing the highly successful OPC UA modeling capabilities to DPPs - including an open source reference implementation - we are enabling seamless integration of DPP data across vendors, platforms and system levels. The timeframe is remarkable: It took the OPC Foundation just two weeks from initial concepts to final implementation."

The cooperation is intended to contribute to the harmonization of technical standards for the Digital Product Passport and support the digital transformation and sustainability goals of the European Union.