OPC-F Working Groups

The OPC Foundation working groups (OPC-F WGs) are essential for the development of industry-leading specifications, technologies, certification and processes. The focus of these working groups is to provide the deliverables that are adopted by the OPC community into real-world products and services. Meetings are generally conducted online and occasionally in person.

Members have the opportunity to participate in Working Groups to ensure that their unique technology needs are considered by the industry-at-large. This approach allows the OPC Foundation, through the participation of its members as marketing and engineering resources, to move the standard forward to meet the technology challenges of tomorrow. See the FAQ for details on how to join a group.

Working groups in which the OPC Foundation partners with other standards organizations are identified as collaborations.

To join a working group please send an email to one of the contacts.

Working Groups:

Unified Architecture Working Group (Contact: jim.luth_at_schneider-electric.com)
Responsible for defining, maintaining and improving the OPC UA specifications. Additionally, base architecture enhancements are evaluated for extensibility into other companion specifications (e.g. information modeling; adding native OPC UA data types). The core UA working group has weekly electronic meetings and 3-4 Face2Face meetings per year. A number of expert sub-groups support the UA working group:

  • The Security group assures that OPC UA security mechanisms are always up to date. It also assesses security alerts or warnings. Membership includes OPC UA stack developers to assure that any issues are handled in a timely manner.
  • The PubSub prototyping group strives to assess and improve the specified PubSub model with prototype implementations. This includes jump-start meetings with interoperability tests.
  • The TSN sub-group started in June 2015 and does the groundwork for PubSub over TSN so that TSN streams can be configured for deterministic controller to controller communication.

Compliance Working Group (CWG) (Contact: Paul.hunkar_at_opcfoundation.org)
Responsible for the OPC Foundation Compliance program. This group analyzes OPC specifications to determine how products are to be tested for compliance. The group meets weekly to discuss test procedures, Compliance Lab standard operating procedures, and to continually update and enhance the Compliance Test Tools.

UA for Devices Working Group (Contact: matthias.damm_at_ascolab.com)
Responsible for defining, maintaining and improving the OPC UA for Devices (DI) specification. DI specifies a generic data model to represent devices. Parameters as well as control functions can be exposed and grouped according to their purpose (e.g. configuration, diagnosis, and statistics).

Field Level Communication Initiative (Contact: Peter.lutz_at_opcfoundation.org)
The vision of the initiative -started in November 2018- is to strive for an open, uniform, secure and standards-based IIoT communication solution between sensors, actuators, controllers and the cloud that meets all the requirements of industrial automation – factory automation but also process automation. For factory automation special requirements like deterministic communication, functional safety and motion are optional features.
More Information:

Harmonization Working Group (Contact: Wolfgang.mahnke_at_ascolab.com)
In this working group members of various companion specification working groups and modelling experts meet to harmonize the way companion specifications model things. The working group is responsible for the companion specification template and forms sub-teams to define common modelling constructs usable in a generic way.

The Semantic Validation group (Contact: mathias.maurmaier_at_siemens.com)
This group strives to translate semantic rules that are currently specified in natural language into a format that can be processed programmatically (e.g. using the Web Ontology Language – OWL). This allows tooling to check semantic inconsistencies, or other rule violations.