SERCOS III

Abstract: The SERCOS interface originated in the mid-1980s, as a result of the initiative of the German organisations ZVEI (Electrical and Electronic Manufacturers' Association) and VDW (Automotive Industry Organisation). The industry consortium formed at that time designed an open interface to convert analogue drive technology to digital. The first generation of the SERCOS supported transfer rates of 2 and 4 Mbit/s and at first was primarily used for demanding machine tool applications. In 1995, it was accepted as IEC 61491. The second generation of the SERCOS followed in 1999. The transfer rate was increased to 8 and 16 Mbit/s and the service channel, used for the transfer of asynchronous data, was expanded. The SERCOS interface has revolutionised whole machine-building industries. Though its original concept was simply as a drive interface, today the SERCOS interface is known as a universal "motion control" interface. The SERCOS interface not only defines a real-time communication system, it specifies over 400 standardised parameters that describe the collaboration of controls and drives with semantics that cover any manufacturer's products. The SERCOS interest group will combine SERCOS interface mechanisms with the advantages of Ethernet structure.

Abstract: Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) is becoming more important in automotive and industrial sectors. There is no clear strategy how to use TSN to improve and migrate the established real-time protocols without excluding legacy devices. This paper presents a realistic concept to integrate TSN into automation networks. We choose Sercos as a deterministic Industrial-Ethernet protocol to be extended with the TSN Standards IEEE 802.1AS-Rev and IEEE 802.1Qbv. By simulating the Sercos over TSN network, we investigate the impact of integrating a TSN-capable switch in a Sercos network to enable a topology extension from line/ring to star/tree. By comparing the impact of: increasing the data rate and topology extension, we demonstrate the improvement of Industrial-Ethernet timing performance.

Abstract: Industrial communication systems increasingly deploy wireless technologies. In order to benefit from flexibility and cost saving potentials, wireless systems have to cope with the requirements of industrial applications, in particular timing constraints. Due to their hard and isochronous real-time characteristics, control applications on the field level of factory automation have not been considered for wireless communication, yet. This paper addresses the use of wireless Point-to-Point communication in conjunction with Industrial Ethernet protocols on field level by means of a modular gateway architecture. The main contributions of this work include: wireless Industrial Ethernet gateway design, its implementation on Sercos III and Wi-Fi based demonstrator platform and its evaluation by means of empirical measurements showing the applicability of the proposed approach.

Abstract: The importance of information availability from field device to management level is continuously growing against the background for meeting the demands on competitive and flexible production systems in discrete manufacturing. Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm seems to promise to fulfill this requirement. However, SOA will not be applicable to every field device due to e.g. computational limitations. Therefore this paper presents an approach for the integration of manufacturing field devices based on fieldbus information models and services. This is done by a controller-based SOA gateway and a semantic transformation of fieldbus information models and services into OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA). An on-the-fly transformation of data and services based on OPC UA is proposed and validated using sercos III as Real-Time-Ethernet (RTE)-based fieldbus.