OPC UA FX Release Candidate Adds Connecting Devices and Profiles
Version 1.00.04 introduces Parts 81 and 84, an interoperability event ran at Beckhoff in February, and a multi-vendor demonstration is set for SPS in November.
The OPC Foundation's Field Level Communications initiative published UAFX Specification Release Candidate V1.00.04, reported in the March 2026 Field Level Communications Corner. The release candidate introduces OPC 10000-81, the UAFX Connecting Devices and Information Model, and OPC 10000-84, UAFX Profiles, extending a base that already comprised Parts 80 to 83: overview and basic concepts, base information model and communication concepts, networking services, and offline engineering data structures.
Technical changes in this candidate include extensions to the ConnectionManager and ConnectionConfigurationSets, added Global Discovery Server address support, more flexible referencing from a ConnectionEndpoint to DataSet Readers and Writers, improved publishing-interval configuration, and clarified requirements for Events and LogObject contents.
Of the two new parts, Profiles is the one an integrator will meet first. Profiles are what a tender can name and what a factory acceptance test can check — the difference between a device that claims UAFX support and a device whose support is defined precisely enough to be verified.
The context around the specification matters as much as its contents. A prototyping interoperability event ran from 16 to 19 February 2026 at Beckhoff Automation in Berlin, and a multi-vendor demonstration — controller and device prototypes including motion devices, remote I/O, field instruments and fieldbus gateways working with controllers and edge gateways — is scheduled to debut at SPS in Nuremberg in November 2026.
OPC UA FX is the effort to push OPC UA below the supervisory layer into controller-to-controller and now controller-to-device communication, territory currently held by proprietary fieldbuses. Those two events bracket the window in which multi-vendor UAFX devices become something you can specify rather than anticipate, which makes this a reasonable year to start asking device vendors for their UAFX roadmap instead of assuming another fieldbus generation.
Source: OPC Connect