Joint Forces for Digital Product Passport (DPP)

NUREMBERG, Germany - Nov. 12, 2024 - 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). The will combine 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 modelled with OPC UA, and integrating them with the semantics of the Asset Administration Shell and ECLASS, the rich and existing ecosystem of OPC UA modelling tools can be leveraged to build DPPs. To access the resulting DPPs, the existing REST interfaces of both OPC UA and the Asset Admin Shell can be used. An integration with international dataspaces is also possible.
 
“I am glad we managed to build consensus with so many of the leading Industry 4.0 consortia and institutes to create this better-together architecture," said Erich Barnstedt, senior director and architect, Industrial Standards, Corporate Standards Group at Microsoft Corporation. “With this approach, companies can use their existing investment in OPC UA technology and use it to easily build Digital Product Passports for their industry, while making them available in their supply chain via standardized interfaces, data models, data formats and semantics. I believe this will give the DPP technology the necessary adoption boost it will need to meet the 2027 deadline set by the European Commission.”
 
 “The Plattform Industrie 4.0 has been promoting the interoperability of the Asset Admin Shell, OPC UA and related technologies in their Reference Architecture for Industrie 4.0 (RAMI4.0) for over a decade," said Thomas Hahn, coordinating the International Manufacturing-X activities worldwide, Siemens Fellow.

“Therefore, we are delighted that key stakeholders and industry consortia have come together to build this joint architecture including results from the DPP4.0 initiative to accelerate and to support the adoption of the Digital Product Passport (DPP). We are confident that this will drive cost of deployment and operations for the DPP down and enable the use of DPP technology also for small- and medium-sized manufacturers on a worldwide basis.”

IDTA (Industrial Digital Twin Association) welcomes all initiatives that promotes the global adoption of the Asset Administration Shell (AAS). In collaboration with the OPC Foundation, the combination of AAS and OPC UA technologies delivers significant benefits for Industry 4.0 solutions. According to Matthias Boelke, Chairman of IDTA, "The information modeling capabilities and the OT connectivity of OPC UA, coupled with the comprehensive asset representation and life-cycle focus of AAS, result in a powerful architecture not only for the Digital Product Passport (DPP) but for Industry 4.0 applications in general." This collaboration of well-known associations not only accelerates DPP adoption but also enhances interoperability, efficiency, and standardization in industrial digitalization processes. By leveraging the strengths of both AAS and OPC UA, companies can easily build DPPs and make them available in their supply chain through standardized interfaces with harmonized data models. This collaboration is a crucial step towards the widespread implementation of Industry 4.0 solutions.”

"The signal of close technical harmonization and cooperation between the standardization organizations (SDO's) involved is critically important in order to avoid double standardization in the interests of the industry. I therefore expressly welcome the idea of taking the best from all technologies and contributing to a joint solution,” said Stefan Hoppe, president OPC Foundation. "The OPC Foundation has been standardizing the interoperability of interfaces for information exchange for decades - it's our DNA." OPC UA includes a powerful modeling language and has already integrated a wide range of transport options for information and IT security which scales from the sensor to the cloud. With the OPC Foundation Cloud Initiative, this interoperability is applied within edge and cloud solutions such as Digital Twins, Metaverse etc. We look forward to coordinating with other organizations on the application for DPP and DataSpaces."
 
“CESMII is delighted to see this extraordinary alignment of global semantic interoperability initiatives – based on industry standards! This harmonization is the result of a multi-year effort, and will pave the way for manufacturers to build more robust, more open and resilient architectures," said John Dyck, CEO of CESMII – The Smart Manufacturing Institute. “While this will certainly impact Digital Product Passport use cases, it will also have enormous impact in enabling manufacturing operations to participate more effectively in a real time supply chain data exchange!”