This specification was created by a joint working group of the OPC Foundation and TMC. It defines an OPC UA Information Model to represent the TMC models.

OPC Foundation

The OPC Foundation defines standards for online data exchange between automation systems. They address access to current data (OPC DA), alarms and events (OPC A&E) and historical data (OPC HDA). Those standards are successfully applied in industrial automation.

The new OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA) unifies the existing standards and brings them to state-of-the-art technology using service-oriented architecture (SOA). Platform-independent technology allows the deployment of OPC UA beyond current OPC applications only running on Windows-based PC systems. OPC UA can also run on embedded systems as well as Linux / UNIX based enterprise systems. The provided information can be generically modelled and therefore arbitrary information models can be provided using OPC UA.

TMC Working Group

The Tobacco Machine Communication (TMC) Working Group was formed to help secondary machine manufacturers design their machines to meet the harmonised requirements of its clients, both in terms of machine-to-machine communication and in terms of machine-to-manufacturing system communication.

At the time of writing the TMC Working Group consists of the following members:

• British American Tobacco
• Imperial Tobacco Group
• JT International
• Philip Morris International