The OPC Foundation and Sercos International have released the Sercos OPC UA Companion Specification.
This specification describes the mapping of the Sercos device model and the Sercos device profiles to OPC UA, so that functions and parameters of Sercos devices are made accessible via OPC UA in a vendor-independent manner.
According to Sercos, this initiative aims to simplify the communication between machine periphery and supervisory IT systems and to support the requirements of Industry 4.0 regarding semantic interoperability.
"Sercos provides a very rich robust device model and device profiles that made logical sense to plug into an OPC UA namespace," said Thomas Burke, OPC Foundation president and executive director. "The Sercos OPC UA Companion Specification enables machine to machine interoperability, and machine integration with the cloud-based applications at a minimum. Sercos suppliers will now be able to take advantage of the rich service oriented architecture of OPC UA, truly facilitating the vision of the embedded world having information integration into the cloud. The OPC community will now be able to easily extend their products to support the great networking technology of Sercos. Both organizations are working together to facilitate and help the suppliers bring certified products to the marketplace supporting this new companion specification."
The mapping rules specified by Sercos can be used for different implementation approaches. (Source: Sercos International)
"In today’s manufacturing systems, automation devices & systems from many different manufacturers have to be integrated and maintained, resulting in significant total cost of ownership (TCO) during the entire product life cycle," said Peter Lutz, managing director of Sercos International. "At the same time, product planning and control require process and machine related information to facilitate the efficient use of the manufacturing resources. This challenge can be best faced with a standardized mapping which brings together the well-defined semantics of Sercos with the OPC UA Sercos information model. Use cases cover a broad range from device parametrization and network configuration up to energy management and preventive maintenance. Furthermore new business models can be easily implemented because users and suppliers can rely on a consistent and vendor-independent semantic."
