May 1, 2012 - PLCopen has started a new activity in cooperation with CAN in Automation. This includes the standardization of communication mechanism for starting and stopping other controllers, to share computing power and other resources, to support fault tolerant systems, and to react on events generated by other controllers. Increasingly machine builders are faced with distributed control systems, in particular in medical devices, in mobile machinery, and in modular machines. In general, you can design distributed control systems with IEC 61131 compliant controllers. However, you need some manufacturer-specific additions to achieve this.
In order to close this gap, PLCopen and CiA call for experts to address the necessary functionalities.
One of the basic ideas is to be able to link variables in different engineering systems via a top level architecture in a very easy way. For this the concept of a proxy function block was presented and discussed. Via PLCopen XML one can make the interface available to the higher level engineering system, which can generate a proxy based on the imported functionality which can be exported the relevant information to the other engineering system while representing the overall structure.
About PLCopen
PLCopen was founded in 1992 as an independent worldwide association for industrial suppliers and users. It is the leading association resolving topics related to industrial control programming. PLCopen creates concepts to reduce the costs of industrial automation. These cost savings are realized in areas such as engineering, training, operation and maintenance. Together with its members, PLCopen creates specifications to materialize these concepts.
