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!”

"The VDMA is pleased about the successful harmonization of the two technologies OPC UA and AAS to facilitate the application of the Digital Product Passport as well as further Industrie 4.0 use-cases," said Andreas Faath, managing director, Machine Information Interoperability (MII): “The combination of both technologies reduces implementation hurdles especially for SMEs and increases adaptation. With this initiative a big step to fulfill the need of the mechanical engineering industry for a harmonized ecosystem interoperability is done. The VDMA released more than 100 standardized interfaces that will be usable additionally within the AAS based on OPC UA Information Models.

“The Digital Twin Consortium welcomes this initiative to consolidate and merge the digital twin technologies developed and maintained by the OPC Foundation, the Industrial Digital Twin Association, and the International Data Spaces Association,” said Bill Hoffman, chairman and CEO of Object Management Group. “We have developed and maintained an open-source reference implementation of the Asset Admin Shell Repository for years. This implementation already leverages OPC UA technology, and we’re excited to collaborate with the organizations involved to develop this implementation further.”

About CESMII

CESMII–the Smart Manufacturing Institute–has a total current investment of $140M (with an additional $61M under negotiation) from Department of Energy funding and public/private partnership contributions, with a mandate to create a more competitive manufacturing environment here in the US through advanced sensing, analytics, modeling, control and platforms. CESMII is one of 17 Manufacturing USA institutes on this mission to increase manufacturing productivity, global competitiveness, and reinvestment by increasing energy productivity, improving economic performance and raising workforce capacity. University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) is the program and administrative home of CESMII.

About DTC

Digital Twin Consortium (DTC) is Accelerating Digital Twin Innovation.  DTC executes the promise of digital twins and associated technologies by working closely with our members to accelerate the market. We do this by fostering development, raising awareness, increasing adoption, and improving the interoperability of digital engineering projects propelled by digital twins across many industries.  DTC is a program of Object Management Group.
 

About ECLASS

ECLASS is one of the global reference data standards for the classification and unambiguous description of products and services with its semantic dictionary. Why ECLASS? Because a standardized master-data system is essential to enterprise-wide improvements. Because ECLASS sets the semantic standard for data exchange. And because ECLASS, as an open standard, is constantly evolving and can be adapted to individual user needs. ECLASS was founded in 2000. The ECLASS Standard currently offers about 48,000 product classes and more than 23,000 unique properties that can be collectively categorized with only four levels of classification. As a result, every product and service can be described with an eight-digit code.

About LNI 4.0

LNI 4.0 is pre-competitive and non-Profit and was founded by companies from the Industry 4.0 platform together with the VDMA, ZVEI and Bitkom associations in 2015 and supports German SMEs in their pioneering role in digitalization. Members can get to know and try out new technologies, innovations and business models in Industry 4.0 test-centers and check their technical and economic feasibility before the product is launched on the market. The LNI 4.0 testbeds offer an ideal environment - without competitive pressure and with minimal financial and technical risks to validate use cases and their interoperability and to contribute the results to the standardization process together with the SCI 4.0. This generates market-relevant knowledge Transfer.

About IDTA

The Industrial Digital Twin Association e.V. (IDTA) was founded in September 2020 on the initiative of Plattform Industrie 4.0 and 23 organisations from the electrical and digital industry, mechanical engineering, the software sector, and end users.

The IDTA is the first point of contact for the standardised Digital Twin and offers all industrial organisations a platform for participation. The aim is to establish the Digital Twin for components, machines, plants and entire factories as an open source technology and to develop it further together with industry.

The core technology for the implementation is the Asset Administration Shell (AAS), that enables quick and easy access to data over the entire life cycle thanks to standardised software structure, interfaces and semantics using current security mechanisms. The AAS has already enabled, among other things, the realisation of a digital nameplate, the simple provision of the CO2 footprint of an asset or the comprehensive asset management in production plants.

The AAS is internationally standardised in IEC 63278 and is a central component of the Manufacturing-X projects, which describe the data space of the future industrial supply chain.

About the OPC Foundation

The OPC Foundation has been promoting the development and adoption of the OPC information exchange standard since 1996. As an advocate and steward of these specifications, the OPC Foundation's mission is to help vendors, end users, and software developers achieve interoperability of their manufacturing and automation resources. The OPC Foundation's mission is to provide the best specifications, technologies, processes, and certification to ensure interoperability between different vendors and different platforms securely and reliably from embedded systems to the enterprise cloud. The Foundation supports over 1000 members from around the world in industrial automation, IT, IoT, IIoT, M2M, Industry 4.0, building automation, machine tools, pharmaceuticals, petrochemical and smart energy in achieving this goal. 

About VDMA

The VDMA represents 3600 German and European companies in the mechanical and plant engineering industry. The industry stands for innovation, export orientation and medium-sized companies. The companies employ a total of around 3 million people in the EU-27, more than 1.2 million of them in Germany alone. This makes the mechanical and plant engineering industry the largest employer among the capital goods industries, both in the EU-27 and in Germany. It is estimated that the sector generates a turnover of around 910 billion euros in the European Union. Around 80 per cent of the machines sold in the EU come from a production plant in the single market.

About ZVEI

The ZVEI represents the common interests of the electrical and digital industry and the associated service companies in Germany and at international level. The association has more than 1,100 member companies, and 170 employees work in the ZVEI Group. The industry employs 900,000 workers in Germany (as of April 2024). In 2023, its turnover was around 238,1 billion euros. The electrical and digital industry is one of the most innovative economic sectors in Germany. One fifth of the industry's turnover is accounted for by product innovations. Every third innovation in the manufacturing industry as a whole gets its original impetus here. Almost a quarter of all R&D expenditure in the manufacturing sector in Germany comes from the electrical and digital industry. Every year, the sector spends around 20 billion euros on R&D and more than seven billion euros on investments.