August 27th, 2009 – Itris Automation Square announced PLC DocGen, which automatically generates a precise and synthetic documentation, thus helping reverse engineering be it for new developments based on legacy code or for maintenance and modernization.During its whole lifecycle, a typical PLC program will be read and modified by many contributors: development and commissioning teams, maintenance and modernization technicians and engineers, project managers. Unfortunately, the code is often the only available documentation and working on an undocumented program is always a major loss of time. Also, manually writing documentation is tiresome and error-prone.
The need for a perfectly consistent format and the tediousness of the task argue for an automated tool based approach; that’s what PLC DocGen offers.Indeed, PLC DocGen automatically generates a dataflow oriented view of a PLC program (from inputs towards outputs) represented by equations and flowcharts, thus abstracting the actual sequential execution of the program. This view is a perfect intermediate formalism between specifications and the code itself. It is independent from the programming style and the type (and vendor) of PLC hardware on which the program runs.
Also, PLC DocGen may use as a parameter any kind of documentation template (title blocks, symbols…) thus ensuring a consistent formatting for all documents.PLC DocGen is available for programs written for April/Orphe, SMC, TSX Série7 and Unity (Premium, Quantum and M340) PLCs offered by Schneider Electric and for Step7 and Step5 PLCs offered by Siemens. It is sold by Itris Automation Square as a service with accompanying training and consulting offerings.
