Digital Twin Consortium and OPC Foundation announce liaison agreement
March 2023
News
The Digital Twin Consortium (DTC) and OPC Foundation have 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 standardisation requirements.
• Realising interoperability by harmonising 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) programmes, including technology, terminology and taxonomy; security and trustworthiness; conceptual, informational, structural and behavioural models; enabling technologies such as simulation and AI, technology stack across the digital twin lifecycle; and case study development.
• Developing and understanding open-source reference implementations.
Stefan Hoppe, president of the OPC Foundation, said: “The OPC Foundation maintains the global standard for secure industrial interoperability for information modelling 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 programme, 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. The two organisations have already started collaborating on open-source projects and these projects will expand to include emerging technologies,” said Erich Barnstedt, chief architect of standards at Microsoft. Both consortia will exchange information through regular consultations, joint contributor relations, seminars, open-source projects and other activities.
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