The exhibit will demonstrate the interoperability of SERCOS interface products from multiple vendors. It will be in the OMAC Packaging Workgroup booth, C-67, in the concourse entrance to upper-level McCormick Place North.
The demo will feature controllers from Automation Intelligence, Beckhoff, Bosch Rexroth, and Rockwell Automation each running servo drives from those four vendors plus servo drives from Danaher Motion. The controllers and drives all conform to the SERCOS interface Pack Profile, a subset of the SERCOS interface functions defined for packaging machinery to improve the multi-vendor interoperability of servo controllers and drives. The SERCOS organizations developed the Pack Profile in response to a request by the OMAC Packaging Workgroup.
The demo illustrates the benefits to the packaging machine builder and end user of utilizing the SERCOS interface (IEC 61491) and PLCopen (IEC 61131-3) international standards, plus OMAC guidelines for interoperability such as the PackML state model with PackTags. PackML standardizes machines, modes, commands, and data.
The published SERCOS Pack Profile specification, plus a white paper on the subject, are available at this Web page.