Sercos Releases Companion Standard for OPC UA

July 25, 2017
The OPC Foundationā€™s latest partnership geared toward increased interoperability in industrial automation is aimed at mapping the Sercos device model and profiles to OPC UA.

Just about any user conference we attend these days has at least some discussion of OPC UA. It has become the go-to standard for open-source software and an important enabler of the interoperability that has become a key talking point for industrial automation and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT).

The OPC Foundation has made several partnership announcements over the past couple years, including a connection with Microsoft, FDTā€™s native integration of OPC UA and many more. Add to that the release last week of the Sercos OPC UA Companion Specification, which 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 way.

This initiative between Sercos International and the OPC Foundation aims to simplify the communication between machine periphery and supervisory IT systems, and to support the requirements of Industry 4.0 regarding semantic interoperability.

ā€œSercos provides a very rich, robust device model and device profiles that made logical sense to plug into an OPC UA namespace,ā€ said Thomas Burke, president and executive director of the OPC Foundation. ā€œThe 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.ā€

Manufacturers are typically faced with integrating and maintaining automation devices and systems from many different suppliers, significantly increasing total cost of ownership (TCO) through the product lifecycle, commented Peter Lutz, managing director of Sercos International. ā€œAt the same time, product planning and control require process- and machine-related information to facilitate the efficient use of the manufacturing resources,ā€ he said. ā€œThis 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.ā€

The mapping rules specified by Sercos can be used for different implementation approaches. The OPC UA server functionality can be implemented in a Sercos master device such as CNC or PLC, or it can be transferred 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.

ā€œUse cases cover a broad range from device parametrization and network configuration up to energy management and preventive maintenance,ā€ Lutz said. ā€œFurthermore, new business models can be easily implemented because users and suppliers can rely on a consistent and vendor-independent semantic.ā€

About the Author

Aaron Hand | Editor-in-Chief, ProFood World

Aaron Hand has three decades of experience in B-to-B publishing with a particular focus on technology. He has been with PMMI Media Group since 2013, much of that time as Executive Editor for Automation World, where he focused on continuous process industries. Prior to joining ProFood World full time in late 2020, Aaron worked as Editor at Large for PMMI Media Group, reporting for all publications on a wide variety of industry developments, including advancements in packaging for consumer products and pharmaceuticals, food and beverage processing, and industrial automation. He took over as Editor-in-Chief of ProFood World in 2021. Aaron holds a B.A. in Journalism from Indiana University and an M.S. in Journalism from the University of Illinois.

Companies in this Article

Sponsored Recommendations

Why Go Beyond Traditional HMI/SCADA

Traditional HMI/SCADAs are being reinvented with today's growing dependence on mobile technology. Discover how AVEVA is implementing this software into your everyday devices to...

4 Reasons to move to a subscription model for your HMI/SCADA

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) gives you the technical and financial ability to respond to the changing market and provides efficient control across your entire enterpriseā€”not just...

Is your HMI stuck in the stone age?

What happens when you adopt modern HMI solutions? Learn more about the future of operations control with these six modern HMI must-haves to help you turbocharge operator efficiency...