OPC Foundation announces key updates in governance, elections, and membership fees
Updated bylaws and new affiliate policy
Continuing the ongoing commitment to governance and transparency, the OPC Foundation has updated its bylaws. These new bylaws, approved by the Board of Directors, are effective from Jan 1, 2025.
Affiliates of OPC Foundation members are now categorized into two categories: “Conventional Affiliate” and “Independent Affiliate” member. All affiliates are automatically considered “Conventional Affiliate” providing a clean legal operational background for large enterprises. “Independent Affiliate” are identical to independent “Corporate members”.
For more details, please refer to the articles “Updated Bylaws of the OPC Foundation” and “New Affiliate Participation Policy.”
Board election process and results
The Board of Directors is democratically elected by the OPC Foundation members (categories Corporate and end-users). Each year, about half of the Board seats are up for election for a two-year term.
Results of election: Elected to Board seats for 2025-2026:
- Bernhard Eschermann – ABB
- Matthias Damm – Unified Automation
- Stefan Hoppe – BECKHOFF
- Takashi Shibata – Mitsubishi Electric
- Jan Bezdicek – Rockwell Automation
- Claudius Link – SAP SE
- Aurelien Le Sant – Schneider Electric
Find more details about all directors on the board here.
OPC Foundation member fees
The OPC Foundation is a worldwide, non-profit organization with over 1000+ members in different member categories. The associated fees with those categories have been stable since 2013.
- Corporate members are OPC technology providers that offer OPC products.
- End-User members are the consumers of OPC-based products.
- Non-Voting members are organizations such as government and research institutions, universities, and non-profit groups that require information on OPC technology, but who do not build or market OPC-based products.
- UA Logo members offer OPC UA products.
For full details, visit the OPC Foundation announcement.
Joint forces for Digital Product Passport (DPP)
The Clean Energy and Smart Manufacturing Innovation Institute (CESMII), the Labs Network Industrie 4.0 (LNI 4.0), the Digital Twin Consortium, the ECLASS e.V., the Industrial Digital Twin Association (IDTA), the OPC Foundation (OPCF), the VDMA, and the ZVEI have joined forced to create a best-of-breed system architecture to support the upcoming Digital Product Passport (DPP) by combining the best aspects of the Asset Administration Shell, OPC UA, and other related technologies. By making use of CESMII’s Smart Manufacturing Profiles, which are modeled with OPC UA, and integrating them with the semantics of the Asset Administration Shell and ECLASS, the rich and existing ecosystem of OPC UA modeling tools can be leveraged to build DPPs. To access the resulting DPPs, the existing REST interfaces of both OPC UA and the Asset Administration Shell can be used. An integration with international dataspaces is also possible.
Read the full press release.
Cloud Corner – December 2024
Google Cloud and major manufacturers join the OPC Foundation cloud Initiative.
Following the successful launch of the OPC Foundation Cloud Initiative in Apr 2024, the OPC Foundation has announced, during the SPS show, the participation of leading cloud providers and industrial automation companies in the ongoing effort to enhance interoperability in IT and cloud environments leveraging OPC UA.
The initiative aims to standardize interoperability by enhancing the integration of IT and cloud applications using OPC UA, developing a cloud reference architecture with best practices, maintaining OPC UA Information Models (Companion Specifications) in the cloud for semantic data models, and creating a new protected identity for OPC UA Cloud eXchange ‘UACX’.
The OPC UA Cloud Initiative steering committee includes prominent cloud suppliers, such as Alibaba Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Huawei Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and SAP Cloud. Additionally, leading industrial automation companies like ABB, Beckhoff, Honeywell, Mitsubishi Electric, Rockwell Automation, Schneider Electric, Siemens, and Yokogawa are actively participating.
For more information, read the full release.
Field Level Communications Corner – December 2024
OPC UA FX Learn@Lunch during SPS 2024
The FLC Initiative of the OPC Foundation organized a 90-minutes event during SPS show in Nuremberg (Germany) to give an update about OPC UA FX and explain the impact it has on the future of industrial communication. The speakers and the panelists are Matthias Gärtner (Siemens), Paul Brooks (Rockwell Automation), Andreas Pfaff (Mitsubishi Electric), Veli-Pekka Ketonen (B&R), Jochen Weiland (Schneider Electric) and René Hummen (Belden) sharing insights about the OPC UA FX value propositions and how the solution differs from conventional fieldbuses.
Launch of Certification Program for OPC UA FX
The OPC Foundation has announced the addition of OPC UA FX (Field eXchange) capabilities to its certification program. OPC UA Certification Program provides a formal testing and certification process for controllers that implement the OPC UA FX specification series (OPC 10000-80, OPC 10000-81, OPC 10000-82, OPC 10000-83 and OPC 10000-84). The program is based on the OPC UA Compliance Test Tool (UACTT), which has been extended to include now more than 350 test scripts for testing the OPC UA FX functionality in addition to the existing test capabilities for OPC UA and for the Companion Specifications.
FLC WG F2F Meeting at ABB in Mannheim (Germany)
The FLC Technical Working Group met for its last F2F meeting in 2024 at ABB in Mannheim (Germany). Progress was made in further developing OPC UA FX for different controller-to-device use cases, including motion control, field instruments, and remote I/O. Working topics included networking with Ethernet/TSN, bootstrapping, constrained devices, information modelling, offline engineering and conformance testing.
Read the full release for more details.
Compliance Corner – December 2024
Year-end Summary
OPC Certification had a busy year. The test labs have been actively certifying products, including continuing the certification of companion specifications such as MDIS. The OPC Foundation Field Level Communications (FLC) Initiative and O-PAS have announced mandatory requirements for certification, which will drive additional traffic to the test labs in the coming year.
The OPC Foundation released a new logo to go along with the previous logo. The new logo is simple text, which can be easily printed onto a product.
The Foundation released a new version of the CTT, which includes enhanced functionality for testing AML files, providing testing for OPC UA FX information models/communication, and general enhancements to many aspects of the testing. This further includes the release of new trademarks that are only applicable to products that have been certified by the OPC Foundation certification program.
In addition, the CTT has been enhanced to provide expanded coverage for groups, such as The Open Group and their O-PAS standard.
OPC Foundation has held three successful IOP workshops this year.
What you can look forward to in 2025
The OPC Foundation has expanded automated testing for GDS solutions, including commercial offerings. A new test tool release will cover GDS functionality such as AliasNames, certificate management, discovery, user authentication, and token services for both servers and clients.
Additional enhancements and extensions will automate the OPC UA FX testing. The conformance team will continue to work with the safety working group on the release of a safety compliance test tool that will be part of a safety certification program.
Work with Ethernet-APL will continue to ensure that a product that supports Ethernet-APL and multiple protocols can have the Ethernet-APL portion certified by any of the standardization organizations (i.e. PI, FieldComm group, ODVA) and the results shared between the SDOs. Additionally, work continues with TIACC on establishing a common set of certification tests for time sensitive networking environments. The release of TIACC and the IEC/IEEE 60802 Industrial Profiles for TSN are targeted for 2025. The OPC Foundation is planning on supporting certification for OPC UA-based TSN solutions in 2025/2026, depending on releases.
For full details, visit the OPC Foundation announcement.
Control Engineering explains how OPC Foundation oversight avoids interoperability complexities.
Edited by Puja Mitra, WTWH Media, for Control Engineering, from an OPC Foundation news release.
