The term Umati has its origins in machine tools: Back in 2017, the VDW presented an initiative to develop a standardized, open interface. The stakeholders opted for OPC UA as the basic technology. Just two years later, 70 partners demonstrated at EMO Hannover with a showcase that the connection of 110 machines to 28 software services, which were distributed decentrally across the exhibition grounds, worked via "plug and play". The VDW also launched the Umati - universal machine tool interface - brand in 2018.

In the meantime, numerous other OPC UA Companion Specifications have been created within the VDMA and its partner organizations. Umati is now being expanded to the entire mechanical and plant engineering sector as a community for the use and marketing of OPC UA Companion Specifications in order to give them greater visibility and make them even more widely used. In future, the name Umati will stand for "universal machine technology interface" and thus for the performance promise of interoperable production.

Umati is now a brand and a label for a community that has come together to promote the OPC UA standards in machine and plant engineering. It forms a framework for joint marketing, public relations, demonstrating use cases and addressing end customers. The basis for this is the actual OPC UA interface standardization in various branches of mechanical and plant engineering. "For machine tool manufacturing, we will therefore refer to the latest version of the OPC UA Companion Specification for Machine Tools in future," explains Wilfried Schäfer from the VDW.

The next steps

The next steps include the further optimization of the respective Companion Specifications as well as the dissemination of the respective standards and the development of showcases at trade fairs. In order to demonstrate the suitability of the OPC UA standards for everyday use in production to the diverse customer world, the Umati showcase will demonstrate the cross-industry use of various OPC UA standards. "We expect to see the first concrete products that provide customers with connectivity based on the OPC UA Specification for Machine Tools in the second half of this year," says Schäfer. "It is therefore all the more important for our partners that the development of the Umati community also follows this timetable," he adds.

"Manufacturing companies not only have machine tools, but also an individual mix of different machines and systems, robots and systems. If all these technologies are part of a common ecosystem that creates plug-and-play solutions, this saves end users a lot of time and money," Schäfer continues. Hartmut Rauen, Deputy Managing Director of the VDMA, adds: "17 trade associations are working on their Companion Specifications in more than 30 groupings. This high level of participation forms the basis for genuine, open interoperability between machines and software systems, from the store floor to the cloud. Only the VDMA has the power to bring together the necessary integration power of the most diverse domains of the production worlds."