Recently, Digital Twin Consortium (DTC) and OPC Foundation announced a liaison agreement to accelerate the development and adoption of digital twin-enabling technologies. The two organizations sealed the agreement at the ongoing ARC Forum 2023 in Orlando, Florida.

Particularly, the DTC and the OPC Foundation have worked closely in several open-source reference implementation projects on GitHub. Particularly, they have agreed to collaborate even closer.

Areas of Cooperation

Dan Isaacs, GM, and CTO of DTC, said, “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 in series of activities. First, collaborating on standardization requirements. Next, to realize interoperability by harmonizing technology components and other elements.

In addition, the two groups also agreed aligning work in horizontal domains for adoption in vertical domains and use cases, proof of concepts, and Value Innovation Platforms (VIP) programs. This includes in the following fields:

• 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

Finally, the two groups also agreed in developing and understanding open-source reference implementations.

Elevate Impact of Digital Twin

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.”

Furthermore, Hoppe said, “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.”

Meanwhile, Erich Barnstedt, Chief Architect Standards, Consortia and Industrial IoT, Azure Edge + Platform, Microsoft Corporation said Microsoft is supporting the collaboration, saying the company is one of the key contributors to Digital Twin Consortium’s open-source program.

Moreover, Barnstedt said 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.