The Catena-X Automotive Network e. V. and the OPC Foundation announced on August 19 a strategic collaboration intended to accelerate standardized, cross-company data exchange in the manufacturing industry. The partnership aims to support the upcoming EU Regulation on the Digital Product Passport (DPP), which from 2027 will require trustworthy, machine-readable product data along the entire value chains, according to the announcement.
This collaboration aims to unite two ecosystems:
- Catena-X – an open collaborative data ecosystem for the automotive industry that aims to enable multi-tier collaboration through sovereign, standardized data exchange based on interoperable infrastructures and semantic templates, and
- OPC Foundation – the world's largest organization for industrial interoperability and responsible for OPC UA, a standard for secure and
- semantically enriched information exchange.
- By linking the industrial modeling capabilities of OPC UA with the governance framework and the cloud-based infrastructure of Catena-X, both organizations seek to simplify data integration, reduce reporting errors, and facilitate compliance with new regulatory requirements such as the DPP.
The partners collaborate in the following four areas:
- Semantic integration: combination of OPC UA information modeling with Catena-X's semantic templates to create a comprehensive repository of interoperable, machine-readable models. This technological foundation should also support the automated creation of DPPs from production data.
- Open-source reference implementations: joint development and provisioning of open-source reference implementations for central data space and interoperability components to facilitate the integration of OPC-UA-based systems into the Catena-X data ecosystem.
- Alignment
- of reference architectures: aligning the OPC Foundation's Cloud Initiative reference architecture with Catena-X's data space architecture to enable seamless implementation from shop floor to supply chain.
- Empowering the industrial ecosystem: enabling companies to utilize their existing OPC-UA tools and infrastructures to meet new regulatory requirements — particularly the DPP — reduce integration costs and shorten time-to-compliance.
“The OPC Foundation provides rich, secure and proven access to standardized information – an essential foundation for digital transformation. By connecting these resources to the Catena-X ecosystem, we transform standardized information into cross-enterprise value. This collaboration is a win for both ecosystems and an important step toward end-to-end data chains at large scale and cross-industry solutions such as the Digital Product Passport,”
says Oliver Ganser, Chairman of the Board of Catena-X.
Stefan Hoppe, President and CEO of the OPC Foundation, adds: “This collaboration unites two strong ecosystems: OPC UA as the globally recognized standard for industrial interoperability and Catena-X as a pioneering data space initiative for the automotive industry. The combination of proven standardization and sovereign data exchange offers companies a practical bridge from the shop floor to the cloud. Catena-X thus delivers a significant added value – especially in meeting regulatory requirements such as the Digital Product Passport and the cross-enterprise use of data models, which is also a central building block of the OPC Foundation's Cloud Initiative. Together we are creating a solid foundation for a sustainable and
