As this companion specification only defines the framework, further information are required to create an instance of a WS-compliant machine. These required information are contained in the WS Templates (see Figure 10).

A WS Template contains three domain-specific aspects: The definition of the WS DataPoints (see Table 9), the definition of the machine profiless and the permutation table between the data points and the machine profiles (see Table 12).

Table 12 – Example of a permutation table of a WS Template

A general mapping of the WS Protocol data types to the OPC UA type definition as well as of the OPC UA data types in WS OPC UA is not possible. This is due to the fact that the Weihenstephan Standards with OPC UA have more possibilities to model the information model compared to the already established WS Protocol.

The WS Templates are included in the WS Modeler, a Excel-based modelling tool. The WS Modeler can also be used for creation of NodeSets for the different machine profiles. It can be ordered via the website of the Weihenstephan Standards (https://www.weihenstephan-standards.com).