Agreement to advance the use of digital twins in manufacturing across industries
ORLANDO, FL – FEBRUARY 6, 2023 – Today at the ARC Forum 2023, Digital Twin Consortium® (DTC) and OPC Foundation announced a liaison agreement to accelerate the development and adoption of digital twin-enabling technologies. The DTC and the OPC Foundation have worked closely in several open-source reference implementation projects on GitHub and have agreed to collaborate even closer.
“We are excited about working with OPC Foundation,” said Dan Isaacs, GM, and CTO of DTC. “Through our collaboration, we will influence interoperability standards and processes that will advance the use of digital twins in manufacturing across many industries.”
The DTC and OPC Foundation have agreed to the following activities:
- Collaborating on standardization requirements
- Realizing interoperability by harmonizing technology components and other elements
- Aligning work in horizontal domains for adoption in vertical domains and use cases, proof of concepts, and Value Innovation Platforms (VIP) programs, including:
- Technology, terminology, and taxonomy
- Security and trustworthiness
- Conceptual, informational, structural, and behavioral models
- Enabling technologies, such as simulation and AI
- Technology stack across the digital twin lifecycle
- Case study development
- Developing and understanding open-source reference implementations
Stefan Hoppe, President OPC Foundation, said, “The OPC Foundation maintains the global standard for secure industrial interoperability for information modeling and data exchange, which, as part of this relationship with DTC, benefits all who wish to create semantically identical digital twins. Our involvement to liaise with DTC further strengthens the user’s ability to model each data aspect quickly and precisely, creating and interacting with any digital twin. Digital twins will be fully compatible with the OPC UA framework used in the run-time components within the operational domain.”
“As one of the key contributors to Digital Twin Consortium’s open-source program, Microsoft saw the rising demand for open digital twin technology and industrial interoperability standards like OPC UA. The collaboration of OPC Foundation and DTC will continue to elevate the impact of digital twin technologies. These two organizations have already started collaborating on open-source projects and these projects will expand to include emerging technologies,” said Erich Barnstedt, Chief Architect Standards, Consortia and Industrial IoT, Azure Edge + Platform, Microsoft Corporation.
Both consortia will exchange information through regular consultations, joint contributor relations, seminars, open-source projects, and other activities.
About OPC Foundation
Since 1996, the OPC Foundation has facilitated the development and adoption of the OPC information exchange standards. As both advocate and custodian of these specifications, the Foundation’s mission is to help industry vendors, end-users, and software developers maintain interoperability in their manufacturing and automation assets. The OPC Foundation is dedicated to providing the best specifications, technology, process, and certification to achieve multivendor, multiplatform, secure, reliable, interoperability for moving data and information from the embedded world to the enterprise cloud. The Foundation serves over 890 members worldwide in the Industrial Automation, IT, IoT, IIoT, M2M, Industrie 4.0, Building Automation, machine tools, pharmaceutical, petrochemical, and Smart Energy sectors. For more information about the OPC Foundation, please visit www.opcfoundation.org.
About Digital Twin Consortium
Digital Twin Consortium is The Authority in Digital Twin. It coalesces industry, government, and academia to drive consistency in vocabulary, architecture, security, and interoperability of digital twin technology. It advances digital twin technology in many industries, from Aerospace to natural resources. Digital Twin Consortium is a program of Object Management Group. For more information, visit https://www.digitaltwinconsortium.org.
