SERCOS
Organization Overview
Sercos is one of the world’s leading digital interfaces for communication between controls, drives, I/Os and other decentralized peripheral devices, such as encoders, safety devices and vision systems. Since its first release in 1990, Sercos has been further developed from a digital drive interface into a universal automation bus. The third generation of Sercos is based on Ethernet and is in particular suitable for high-speed and high-precision machining applications. Because of its universal approach that includes motion, safety and I/O capabilities, it can be used for all kind of automation applications. A special feature is the so-called Unified Communication (UC) channel which allows the transmission of additional Ethernet protocols, such as TCP/IP or EtherNet/IP over a common network infrastructure.
TYPICAL USE-CASES INCLUDE
- Visualization: Providing information for human-machine interfaces or operator panels.
- Monitoring: Providing information for energy, condition and process monitoring, network status.
- Diagnosis: Providing context-sensitive diagnosis information for operators and service personnel.
- Engineering: Device parameter browsing, device parametrization, controller optimization, network configuration
Position to OPC UA
The OPC Foundation and Sercos International have started their collaboration in 2011 with the common aim to improve the machine integration and to reduce the complexity of information exchange between machine periphery and higher-level IT systems. The chosen approach is a standardized OPC UA Sercos information model that brings together the well-defined device profiles of Sercos with the data exchange standard of OPC UA. The access to process and machine related information facilitates the efficient and flexible use of the manufacturing resources which is also a key target of Industry 4.0. Application scenarios cover a broad range from device parametrization and network configuration up to energy management and preventive maintenance.
The UC channel can also be used to communicate using the common standard OPC UA.
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