by Gary Mintchell | Oct 12, 2016 | Automation, News, Organizations, Technology
Can we bring more discipline to PLC programming in industrial control?
Discussion swirls at every gathering of automation professionals about the new generation of engineers entering (we hope) the industry. One thing for sure, the new generation begins with a much deeper computer science background than any before. Will they want to continue to code programmable logic controllers (PLCs) in the same relay graphical representation as their predecessors? Even the Structured Text language popular in Europe and other places can string together like an old BASIC program.
I am guessing they will bring more discipline to the craft of coding industrial control than ever before. Evidently PLCopen, the organization devoted to developing standards for PLC programming, does also. It has just announced a new set of coding guidelines.
The organization notes in its press release, “Software is becoming increasingly responsible, complex, and demanding. This does not come without its challenges. Due to the greater complexity, programs are more difficult to maintain, more time consuming, and potentially therefore more expensive. This is why quality is taking such an important role these days.”
Continuing, they note, “Unlike in other industries, such as that of embedded software and computer science, there has not previously been a dedicated standard for Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) programs. This has meant that programs were not measured against anything and were often of a poor quality. But that’s where the independent association PLCopen has come in and set the standard with the release of their coding guidelines. These guidelines are a set of good practice programming rules for PLCs, which will help to control and enhance programming methods within industrial automation.”
PLCopen, whose mission is to provide industrial control programming solutions, collaborated with members from a number of companies in different industries to create these coding guidelines. These companies include PLC vendors such as Phoenix Systems, Siemens, and Omron, to software vendors such as Itris Automation and CoDeSys, and educational institutions such as RWTH Aachen. These guidelines were inspired by some pre-existing standards from other domains such as IEC 61131-3, JSF++ coding standard and MISRA-C, and they are the product of three years of work by the working group. PLCopen’s reference standard can be used for testing the quality of all PLC codes, independent of brand and industry.
PLCopen’s coding guidelines are made up of 64 rules, which cover the naming, comments and structure of the code. By following these guidelines, the quality of the code will be improved and there will be greater consistency amongst developers. This will result in greater efficiency, as better readability means a faster debug time, and a program that is easier to maintain. This then results in lower costs as less time is required in order to maintain the program, and the maintenance should be easy enough for both an internal or external programmer as the code will be more straightforward. If the original developer fails to follow certain guidelines when creating a program, this could obstruct other developers and maintenance teams when working with the code during the product lifecycle, thus creating delays and additional costs.
In safety-critical industries, there is the standard IEC 61508 which in 2011 was also extended to PLCS. However, as quality is becoming an ever more important factor across the board, as programs become bigger and more complex, it is generally good practice to follow a set of rules or a standard in all industries. PLCopen’s coding guidelines suggest a standard that can be used across all industries to greatly improve the quality of the code and, as a result, to help companies save time and money. The introduction of such a standard will allow PLC programs to be verified not only from the simple functionality perspective but also from a coding perspective by confirming that good practice programming rules have been followed in their creation. Consistency across PLC programs can only be achieved through the respect of a global corporate or industrial standard, with PLCopen now being the de facto standard in the automation industry.
With quality playing a greater role in industry and with companies always looking for cost saving methods, the answer is to use some sort of standard or set of rules in order to meet these goals. PLCopen have created this standard to improve quality and consistency across PLC programs and so that individual industries and companies don’t have to go to the effort of creating a set of rules themselves. In addition to the internal benefits, this standard will also allow companies to enforce their quality requirements on suppliers, software contractors and system integrators. The only issue for now is that the process for verifying these rules is done manually by most users as they are unaware that some tools are available to do this automatically. But overall, following a standard such as the one proposed by PLCopen, will greatly improve the quality of the program and will save time and money throughout the whole duration of the product lifecycle.
The PLCopen coding guidelines v1.0 are available to download for free from the PLCopen website.
by Gary Mintchell | Oct 4, 2016 | Automation, News
Is service and solutions the boost Rockwell Automation’s process automation business needs to take off? Talk on the street has it that the product side of the process automation business has not been as robust as it once thought. Meanwhile I’ve also been told that solutions and services, not products, has been the driver for growth in the Connected Enterprise initiative.
Then this announcement that Rockwell has acquired Maverick Technologies fits in all categories. Maverick is a major systems integration player. This following the acquisition of Automation Control Products, although both relatively small acquisitions, may show Rockwell Automation’s charted path to growth.
Two side notes in this announcement. First, this press release introduces Ken Champa as the new Sr. VP of the Control Products and Solutions business replacing Blake Moret in that role. The only mention I could find of him even on the Rockwell website is in Chinese. The second interesting thing (not mentioned in the press release) is that Maverick has become a major supporter of both ISA and MESA International over the past few years. Wonder if that will continue.
From the press release, “Rockwell Automation Inc. has acquired leading systems integrator Maverick Technologies to expand domain knowledge and help deliver innovative control and information solutions to customers in industries, such as chemical, food and beverage, and oil and gas. The acquisition significantly strengthens Rockwell Automation’s expertise in key process and batch applications to help its customers realize greater productivity and improved global competitiveness through process control and information management solutions”
“Industrial control and information solutions are most effective when they result from close collaboration between a knowledgeable supplier and the user,” said Ken Champa, Rockwell Automation senior vice president of Control Products and Solutions. “The combination of our global industrial automation leadership with MAVERICK’s platform-independent domain expertise will help our customers reduce complexity and realize unprecedented productivity.”
“We will continue to deliver our domain expertise, now with the power of a Fortune 500 industrial automation leader at our side,” said Paul Galeski, MAVERICK founder and CEO. “This creates the best combination available to help uncover the benefits of information that drives performance in process industries.”
by Gary Mintchell | Sep 16, 2016 | Automation, Internet of Things, Interoperability, Operations Management, Technology
September 14-15 found me back in Chicago for the International Manufacturing Technology Show (IMTS) and an IIoT conference sponsored by OMG and IIC. I’ll have several reports even though I fly to Sacramento Sunday for the Inductive Automation Ignition Customer Conference. (I’m writing this on Friday, but it may not get posted.)
Tom Burke, OPC Foundation President and Executive Director, stopped me as I walked the aisle. He talked about the cool things happening with OMAC. I do not know the technical details, but OMAC wishes to specify (not sure of exact technical term) OPC UA into its PackML as its communications protocol.
Turns out this is much more significant than I gleaned from the press release. By the time I waded through the marketing general statements, I gave up on reading the rest. For some reason, marketing and/or PR people seem to want to hit every buzz word in the beginning of a release in order to show relevance or something and then bury the good stuff almost off-hand in the bottom of the text.
This is a significant advance for interoperability. There remains a stance in the industry for point solutions that may be based on open standards, but are explicitly not interoperable—everything is held within the kimono, so to speak. Interoperability benefits an entire industry. The more that end users buy according to interop, the faster the pace of adoption will be.
IIoT and Pack Expo
Look for OPC Foundation (booth N-4702), PLC Open (booth N-4703), and OMAC (booth N-4800) at Pack Expo the first week of November. Be sure to vote first! Personally, I am torn between going to a single-supplier event or this one. Both are too expensive for the lone entrepreneur. I’ll wind up with one, though.
The OPC Foundation provided a couple of bullet points about its news:
- the results of joined collaboration between OPCF with OMAC about PackML mapping into OPC UA namespace
- the results of joined collaboration between OPCF and PLCopen about IEC61131-3 PLCopen Client FB to allow initiating an OPC UA connection from inside the controller
OMAC and IIoT
Here is the news from OMAC. “The Organization for Machine Automation and Control (OMAC), OPC Foundation, and PLCopen are working together to help advance communications protocols necessary for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) to succeed.
Interoperability among devices and machines that use different protocols is a significant challenge in realizing the full potential offered by the Industrial Internet of Things. By collaborating on companion specifications to the standards and protocols they’ve already developed OMAC, OPC Foundation, and PLCopen can advance the quality and efficiency of data sharing and communication at the machine and production line and up through the enterprise. Collaborative efforts by standards organizations, such as OMAC, OPC Foundation, and PLCopen, align with the Industrial Internet Consortium’s goal to ultimately identify and define building blocks for interoperability that make smart factories and IIoT possible.
“Standards are needed to support communications from machine-to-machine and from the plant floor to interfaces that will allow large scale data analytics and information transfer,” says John Kowal, a member of OMAC’s Board of Directors, co-chair of the Industrial Internet Consortium’s Smart Factory Task Group, and business development director for B&R Industrial Automation Corp. “It just makes sense for these organizations which have individually done so much to advance automated manufacturing to collaborate and avoid redundant developments.”
Here’s how the three automation standards leaders are bringing their efforts together. One of OMAC’s major initiatives has been promotion of the ISA-TR88.00.02 automation standard commonly known as PackML. The second generation was released last year. Manufacturers and machine builders worldwide have implemented ISA-TR88 on various control platforms to increase speed to production, ease packaging line integration and improve reliability. While PackML defines machine modes, states and tag naming conventions, it does not specify a communications protocol.
The OPC Foundation’s Unified Architecture (OPC UA) is an industrial interoperability framework. It delivers information modeling with integrated security, access rights, and all communication layers to provide plug and play machine-to-machine (M2M) communication inside factories. It is scalable across the plant floor and from sensor to IT enterprise and cloud scenarios. OPC and PLCopen recently worked together to define a set of function blocks to map the IEC 61131-3 global standard for industrial controls programming to the OPC UA information communication model. The latest version was released earlier this year. IEC 61131-3 is the only global standard for industrial control programming and is recommended by OMAC in its Packaging Guidelines document.
To take their efforts to the next level, OMAC and the OPC Foundation have established a taskforce to develop a companion specification for ISA-TR88/PackML and OPC UA by the end of 2016. The task force led by Sari Germanos, open automation manager for B&R Industrial Automation, includes members of OMAC and OPC Foundation from around the world. Participation is open to interested members of either organization.
“A standard communication protocol, used consistently across the industry, is vital for realizing the full benefits of automation standards such as ISA-TR88, which then can be a valuable data source for smart factories and the IIoT,” says Dr. Bryan Griffen, OMAC Chairman and Nestlé Group Engineering Manager. “A companion specification between ISA TR88 and OPC UA fills this need and builds on the work completed with PLCopen earlier this year. The opportunities to transform manufacturing as hardware and software solutions are integrated through consistently applied, standardized protocols are extraordinary. We’re pleased to be a part of those efforts worldwide.”
“Today, there is more reason than ever to believe that communications standards will proliferate, as the IIoT drives the need to flatten network communication architectures,” says OPC Foundation Director Thomas Burke. “Along with organizations like OMAC and PLCopen, we’re actively engaged to do just that.”
“By collaborating and ensuring the standards we’ve developed work together we ensure transparent and fully secured communication right out of the box with standardized access between any OPC client and server via a secure channel, independent from network architecture and protocol or machine type and controls,” says PLCopen Managing Director Eelco van der Wal.
by Gary Mintchell | Sep 13, 2016 | Automation, News, Operator Interface, Technology
Rockwell Automation has announced acquisition of Automation Control Products (ACP), a provider of centralized thin client, remote desktop and server management software. ACP’s two core products, ThinManager and Relevance, provide manufacturing and industry with visual display and software solutions to, as the Rockwell press release put it, “manage information and streamline workflows for a more connected manufacturing environment.”
I met Matt Crandell, ACP CEO, years ago at a trade show touting Linux, as I recall, to a Microsoft crowd. He and his team had developed a thin client technology (“dumb” terminals connected to a server) that brought 1970s and 80s era corporate computing into the modern age. He had good relations with Wonderware but I’ve noticed increasingly strong partnership with Rockwell Automation. This exit was probably the best he could hope for. Congratulations to Matt and the team for a good run and a good exit.
The press release gives us Rockwell’s justification, “This acquisition supports the Rockwell Automation growth strategy to help customers increase global competitiveness through The Connected Enterprise – a vision that connects information across the plant floor to the rest of the enterprise. It is accelerated by the Industrial Internet of Things and advances in technologies, such as data analytics, remote monitoring, and mobility.”
“Today’s plant engineers turn to our technology innovation and domain expertise to help improve their manufacturing quality and reliability while increasing productivity,” said Frank Kulaszewicz, senior vice president of Architecture and Software, Rockwell Automation. “With ACP’s industry-leading products now in our portfolio, we can provide new capabilities for workers as the manufacturing environment becomes more digital and connected.”
ThinManager centralizes the management and visualization of content to every facet of a modern manufacturing operation, from the control room to the end user. It streamlines workflows and allows users to reduce hardware operation and maintenance costs. Relevance extends the ThinManager functionality through proprietary location-based technology, enabling users’ secure mobile access to content and applications from anywhere.
“We are a perfect addition to Rockwell Automation’s industrial automation offerings that aim to increase reliability, productivity and security as well as lower energy and maintenance costs while implementing sustainable technology for leading global manufacturers,” said Matt Crandell, CEO of ACP. “We are confident that our customers will quickly see the value from our two organizations working to address their needs together.”
by Gary Mintchell | Aug 11, 2016 | Automation, Internet of Things, Technology
Following up on its release of REST enabled programmable automation controllers (PACs) for the industrial internet of things, Opto 22 has released Node-RED nodes. The purpose for enabling Node-RED addresses significantly decreasing IIoT application development time and complexity. These Node-RED nodes for PACs make it easier to prototype and develop applications for connecting physical assets to cloud applications. Node-RED nodes and a RESTful API for Opto 22 SNAP PAC R-series and S-series controllers are available free for download.
Rapid IIoT Application Prototyping
Linking technology assets and services together to build IIoT applications often requires layers of complex software development and long development cycles that quickly erode IIoT application ROI. Opto 22’s Node-RED nodes for SNAP PAC programmable automation controllers enable nearly anyone to rapidly prototype and develop IIoT applications with Node-RED, opening a path to quickly connect legacy physical assets to the digital world of cloud services.
Node-RED for IIoT
Node-RED is an innovative visual wiring tool to connect edge computing systems such as industrial automation controllers to cloud services such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) IoT, IBM Watson IoT, and Microsoft Azure in new and interesting ways.
Created by Nick O’Leary (@knolleary) and Dave Conway-Jones (@ceejay) of IBM Emerging Technologies (@ibmets), Node-RED is an open-source, cross-platform technology available on GitHub.com and npmjs.org, and is currently available for a variety of platforms, including OS X, Microsoft Windows, Linux, and Raspberry Pi, and cloud offerings like IBM Bluemix and AT&T Flow. Built on the popular Node.js JavaScript runtime, Node-RED benefits from a large Node-RED library—containing over 500 prebuilt and ready-to-deploy nodes—allowing IIoT application developers to leverage existing software code and deploy it directly into their applications.
“I’ve been very impressed with the whole Node-RED project,” said Jim Turner, Senior Software Developer at Opto 22. “It’s well run, polished, and of high quality, but still very practical and useful. It’s been a pleasure to develop for their platform.” At the time of this release, Node-RED has been downloaded from npmjs.org over 25,000 times in the last month.
Lowering the Technical Bar
The Node-RED development environment offers a gradual and easily approachable learning curve for users of all levels and requires little to no programming skills. Instead, Node-RED takes advantage of pre-programmed, reusable code blocks called nodes. These nodes make IIoT application development simpler, easier to repeat, and faster to scale. Through a visual browser-based, drag-and-drop interface, Node-RED allows IIoT application developers to focus on identifying an opportunity and developing a solution, rather than building the components of an application from scratch.
Advanced JavaScript functions can also be created within the editor using a Function node. A built-in library lets developers save useful functions, templates, or node flows for re-use. The flows created in Node-RED are stored using the widely known JSON format, which can be easily imported and exported for sharing with other developers and applications, promoting the idea of social application development.
Download the Node-RED nodes for Opto 22 SNAP PAC R-series and S-series controllers directly.
