The purpose of the association is to promote the development and wider adoption of a standardized exchange of data in the engineering process of industrial automation systems, in particular through the specification of generally compatible data interfaces, the AutomationML data format. The target of the activities of the Association is to achieve substantial efficiencies and the related savings in costs and time through the of data exchange, whereby data from different crafts of the engineering process can be transferred between the various engineering systems without any difficulty through defined interfaces. The standard to be developed should thereby allow the user to develop products and services to implement this cost savings.

AutomationML association has currently 20 members. . Promoting members of the association are ABB, Daimler, KUKA and Siemens. The membership is possible for every interested company or research institute