3 questions to the new board member Marco Litto

Dr. Marco Litto, Senior Vice President – Strategy & Corporate Program, EPLAN has been appointed to the IDTA board. In a short interview, he talks about his experience in the field of Digital Twins and engineering and his ambitions for his new role.

What is your professional background and how does your role intersect with the concept of the Digital Twin?

As a member of the Eplan Management Board, I am responsible for Corporate Program & Strategy. In this role, I focus intensively on the strategic development of our company as well as on future technologies that are crucial for our customers and partners. One of my core areas of focus is the open and standardized digital collaboration with partners through data and integrations. Open standards such as AAS and ECLASS enable Eplan, our partners and users around the world to utilize their data consistently and efficiently. What truly matters is the economic impact: higher process reliability, reduced integration efforts and measurably faster value creation.

In which activities related to the Asset Administration Shell (AAS) or IDTA have you been involved so far?

We are actively engaged in several IDTA workstreams. In addition to contributing to multiple submodel groups, we are particularly involved in the Digital Component use‑case group. We also contribute our engineering perspective to the work of the Open Technology Working Group. Furthermore, we lead the submodel group Automation Engineering and actively drive the Collaborative Engineering use case together with a wide range of partners. This use case has already been showcased through several exhibition demonstrators-both at IDTA booths and at Eplan booths at various industry events.

Why is an initiative within IDTA important?

From our perspective, our initiative within IDTA is important because it brings the expertise of software companies with a strong engineering focus into the dialogue and supports the further development of key industry standards. At the same time, we contribute to improving, internationally disseminating and enabling the productive use of AAS and ECLASS. Only when such standards are adopted and applied globally can digital collaboration among all major players in automation technology be implemented efficiently and at scale.