The OPC Foundation and Sercos International announce that the Sercos OPC UA Companion Specification Release is now 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 made accessible via 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.
The mapping rules specified by Sercos can be used for different implementation approaches. On the one hand, the OPC UA server functionality can be implemented in a Sercos master device (e.g., 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.
For more insightful details, take gander at the SERCOS Website.