1 Proceedings of the ASME 2019 International Manufacturing Science and Engineering Conference MSEC2019 June 10 – June 14, 2019, Erie, Pennsylvania, USA MSEC2019-2748 TESTING OF THE MTCONNECT – OPC-UA COMPANION SPECIFICATION Ryan Fisher Department of Aerospace Engineering, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Blacksburg, VA 24061 U.S.A. Guodong Shao Systems Integration Division National Institute of Standards and Technology Gaithersburg, Maryland 20899 U.S.A. KEYWORDS Companion Specification; Interoperability; MTConnect; OPC- UA; Testing. ABSTRACT Smart Manufacturing (SM) is the future of the manufacturing industry. Seamless, accurate, and fast connection and communications among devices are critical for SM. By leveraging information technologies, devices can dynamically communicate with each other to increase factory production, while decreasing engineering costs. MTConnect and Open Platform Communications - Unified Architecture (OPC-UA) standards facilitate such communication. MTConnect is a manufacturing interoperability standard that provides a semantic vocabulary for manufacturing equipment to provide structured contextualized data with no proprietary format. The OPC-UA is a platform-independent standard through which various systems and devices can communicate by sending messages between clients and servers over various networks. OPC-UA enables syntactic interoperability between clients and servers. The MTConnect - OPC-UA Companion Specification integrates the two standards to provide manufacturers more efficient and powerful interoperability capabilities. In this paper, we report the test of version 1.02 of this companion specification. This specification sets a standard means of communication between MTConnect devices and OPC-UA Clients/Servers based on Extensible Markup Language (XML) structures. To test the standard, the following components have been developed: an OPC-UA Server, an OPC-UA Client, a probe that translates data structures in MTConnect XML format to MTConnect OPC-UA Companion XML format that can be recognized by the server, a MTConnect XML data parser, and a MTConnect device simulator. The activities of the standard testing include passing varying data structures and objects through the server and confirming the information is received accurately by the client. The findings of the standard testing will be provided to the standard developing organizations for improving the future versions of the standard. INTRODUCTION By increasing the availability of information, the processes of product design, manufacturing, and quality control can all be improved. Now, more than ever, there is a demand for larger amounts of real-time information on manufacturing floors of every scale. The dynamic information enables manufacturers to have better awareness and control over their machines and processes. The information is generated and communicated through the connection and integration of machines with other devices, systems, and applications (e.g., controllers, simulators, or Graphical User Interface (GUI)). MTConnect [1] and the Open Platform Communications (OPC) are two standards that help achieve these goals in the manufacturing industry. MTConnect provides semantic vocabularies for manufacturing capabilities including, but not limited to, device monitoring, automation, and process analytics. The OPC Foundation has created the OPC-Unified Architecture (UA) [2] standard that supports object-oriented implementations that can handle information such as alarms and events, commands, real-time data, and complex data in Extensible Markup Language (XML). MTConnect and the OPC Foundation have partnered to develop the MTConnect - OPC- UA Companion Specification [3] to set a standard means of communication (a gateway) between MTConnect devices, servers, or agents, and OPC-UA servers and clients. Testing the MTConnect - OPC-UA Companion Specification could demonstrate the usability and feasibility of the standard for the manufacturing industry while identifying issues in the current version of the specification can provide feedback to the two standard developing organizations (SDOs), i.e., MTConnect and OPC Foundation, for improvements in future versions. Previous research conducted on manufacturing data integration claims