Practice of Industrial Control Logic Programming using Library Components

This chapter discusses Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) programming practice, particularly the use of library components, in the automotive industry. A study of program structure and use of library components at two European car manufacturers is presented. The main purpose of the study is to provide understanding of current PLC programming in industry

A component-based virtual engineering approach to PLC code generation for automation systems

In recent years, the automotive industry has been significantly affected by a number of challenges driven by globalisation, economic fluctuations, environmental awareness and rapid technological developments. As a consequence, product lifecycles are shortening and customer demands are becoming more diverse. To survive in such a business environment, manufacturers are striving to find a costeffective solution for fast and efficient development and reconfiguration of manufacturing systems to satisfy the needs of changing markets without losses in production. Production systems within automotive industry are vastly automated and heavily rely on PLC-based control systems. It has been established that one of the major obstacles in realising reconfigurable manufacturing systems is the fragmented engineering approach to implement control systems. Control engineering starts at a very late stage in the overall system engineering process and remains highly isolated from the mechanical design and build of the system. During this stage, control code is typically written manually in vendor-specific tools in a combination of IEC 61131-3 languages. Writing control code is a complex, time consuming and error-prone process. [Continues.

An approach to open virtual commissioning for component-based automation

Increasing market demands for highly customised products with shorter time-to-market and at lower prices are forcing manufacturing systems to be built and operated in a more efficient ways. In order to overcome some of the limitations in traditional methods of automation system engineering, this thesis focuses on the creation of a new approach to Virtual Commissioning (VC). In current VC approaches, virtual models are driven by pre-programmed PLC control software. These approaches are still time-consuming and heavily control expertise-reliant as the required programming and debugging activities are mainly performed by control engineers. Another current limitation is that virtual models validated during VC are difficult to reuse due to a lack of tool-independent data models. Therefore, in order to maximise the potential of VC, there is a need for new VC approaches and tools to address these limitations. The main contributions of this research are: (1) to develop a new approach and the related engineering tool functionality for directly deploying PLC control software based on component-based VC models and reusable components; and (2) to build tool-independent common data models for describing component-based virtual automation systems in order to enable data reusability. [Continues.

A Study of Industrial Logic Control Programming Using Library Components

In this paper a study of logic control programming practices and use of library components at two European car manufacturers, is presented. The research provides results important to consider for researchers and PLC vendors when developing frameworks for control program generation, to cope with new requirements of flexible manufacturing systems. The main observations are: the programs, written mainly in Ladder Diagrams and Sequential Function Charts, frequently reuse pre-developed function blocks; it is important that the control programs can be understood and used for trouble-shooting by the operators; and finally, the code handles, besides automatic control, also safety and supervision, human machine interface, product data, communication etc., the code for automatic control is a minor part of the total code

A Study of Industrial Logic Control Programming Using Library Components

In this paper a study of logic control programming practices and use of library components at two European car manufacturers, is presented. The research provides results important to consider for researchers and PLC vendors when developing frameworks for control program generation, to cope with new requirements of flexible manufacturing systems. The main observations are: the programs, written mainly in Ladder Diagrams and Sequential Function Charts, frequently reuse pre-developed function blocks; it is important that the control programs can be understood and used for trouble-shooting by the operators; and finally, the code handles, besides automatic control, also safety and supervision, human machine interface, product data, communication etc., the code for automatic control is a minor part of the total code