Umati Becomes The Language Of All Machines

Umati was the interface for the tool industry - now the VDMA and the Association of German Machine Tool Builders (VDW) want to promote the use and distribution of OPC UA standards for the entire machine building under the name Umati.

The development of Umati

The machine tool industry has been working on a standardized, open interface since 2017. The basic technology for this is OPC UA. Since 2018, the VDW launched the label "Umati" - " U niform Ma chine T ool I nterface". At EMO 2019, the connection of 100 machines to 28 software services, which were distributed across the exhibition center, was demonstrated in a showcase with 70 partners.

Umati

VDW introduces Umati universal communication interface

Umati is now being expanded as a community for the use and marketing of OPC UA Companion Specifications to the entire machine and plant construction . This is intended to help the numerous OPC UA Companion Specifications that have been created to be more visible.

The new name is still Umati, this time with the meaning of " U niform Ma chine T echnology I nterface".

Community for spreading

Umati thus stands for a community that has come together to disseminate the OPC UA standards in mechanical and plant engineering. The community includes joint marketing, public relations, the demonstration of use cases and the addressing of end customers.

The basis is the actual OPC UA interface standardization in various branches of mechanical and plant engineering. For machine tool construction, this means that the current version of the OPC UA Companion Specification for Machine Tools will be used.

Umati products from the second half of the year

The next step is to further optimize the respective companion specifications and to disseminate the respective standards. With Umati showcases, for example at trade fairs, the aim is to demonstrate the suitability for everyday use and the cross-sector use of various OPC UA standards.

The VDMA is optimistic that the first concrete products will be available in the second half of 2020, which will provide customers with connectivity based on the OPC UA Specification for Machine Tools

Help

This is how you get started with OPC UA

Background: OPC UA Companion Specification for mechanical engineering

Machine and plant engineering decided early on to use OPC UA as the standard for data exchange . Because OPC UA offers a uniform framework for interoperability between machines and systems. A bottom-up approach made it clear that basic elements for a large part of the diverse product range in mechanical and plant engineering must be defined uniformly. The simplest example is machine identification, i.e. features such as manufacturer, serial number, year of construction and machine type.

For this reason, various areas at VDMA, including electrical drive technology, plastic and rubber machines, industrial image processing, metallurgy, robotics and machine tools, work on the basic Companion Specification OPC UA for Machinery. "The first version will be released this year," announced Hartmut Rauen, deputy general manager of the VDMA.

Book tip

Industry 4.0 cannot be implemented without manufacturer-independent networking of devices and systems. OPC UA is designed to do just that - but getting started is not always easy. The specialist book Practice Handbook OPC UA helps further.