OPC UA 1.03 Certification Ends This Year, and a Free Model Validator Arrives

Two items from the June 2026 OPC Connect Compliance Corner deserve a place on a procurement calendar. The first is a deadline: support for certification of OPC UA Version 1.03 products ends at the end of 2026, and vendors are directed to target Version 1.05, whose specifications and toolkits have been stable since the initial 1.05 release in 2021.

That is a procurement risk rather than a technical one. A device or server still shipping on 1.03 does not stop working, but it loses its certification path, and anyone whose tender language requires certified products will find a supplier unable to renew. The action is to audit the device catalogue and the installed base now and get written commitments to 1.05 from vendors who have not moved.

The second item is a tool. UACTT Lite is available free of charge as a lightweight complement to the full OPC UA Conformance Test Tool, currently at version 1.05.06. It performs gap analysis between an expected information model definition and a server's actual address space, checking node presence, reference correctness, attributes, data type compatibility, type definition consistency, and both mandatory and optional nodes. It supports more than 160 OPC-released information models mapped to individual namespaces.

The practical value is in commissioning. Until now, "this server implements the companion specification" has largely been a claim on a datasheet, checkable only by someone willing to walk the address space by hand against a PDF. A free tool that performs that comparison turns the claim into something a factory acceptance test can verify, and it costs nothing to add to a standard checklist.

The Compliance Corner also notes Yokogawa's OpreX Open Automation SI Kit as the first O-PAS product to pass OPC Foundation Certification Lab testing.