The aim of the new standards is to develop a common language with which machines can communicate with each other. OPC UA is one such language. VDMA Machine Vision is one of the first VDMA divisions to have now released an OPC UA Companion Specification. A core working group of 17 experts from leading European machine vision companies first came up with proposals for the approach and contents, and monitored the feedback from the machine vision industry and end users worldwide. The standardization work was then incorporated into the global standardization cooperation for machine vision, called G3.

Part 1 describes an abstraction of the generic visual system, i.e. a representation of a digital twin of the system. It handles the management of recipes, configurations, and results in a standardized way, whereas the contents stay vendor-specific and are treated as black boxes.