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OPC Foundation, Digital Twin Consortium enter into liaison agreement

Feb. 16, 2023
Agreement to advance the use of digital twins in manufacturing across industries

At ARC Forum 2023, the Digital Twin Consortium (DTC) and the OPC Foundation announced a liaison agreement to accelerate the development and adoption of digital twin-enabling technologies. The DTC and the OPC Foundation 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.”

Erich Barnstedt, chief architect standards, Consortia and Industrial IoT, Azure Edge + Platform, Microsoft Corp., added: “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.”

Both consortia will exchange information through regular consultations, joint contributor relations, seminars, open-source projects, and other activities.