The OPC Foundation and Sercos International announced that the Sercos OPC UA Companion Specification Release is available.
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 accessible with OPC UA in a vendor-independent manner. 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.
Inclusion of OPC UA in the Sercos system architecture.
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 service oriented architecture of OPC UA.
The mapping rules specified by Sercos can be used for different implementation approaches. On the one hand, the OPC UA server function can be implemented in a Sercos master device, such as a CNC or PLC. On the other hand, it is possible to transfer this functionality to a Sercos slave device. In the latter case, the OPC UA accesses are executed in parallel to the Sercos real-time communication or even without any Sercos real-time communication. Thus, a consistent communication with OPC UA down to the field level is possible without abandoning the hard-real-time communication of the Sercos automation bus.
Sercos
Sercos.org
Filed Under: IoT • IIoT • Internet of things • Industry 4.0
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