Industry forums and presentations focused on digitalization usually mention that companies need to look at new business models. This is also the case for traditional industrial automation vendors. With open multivendor interoperable standards, automation companies still need to be able to compete on traditional dimensions including quality, reliability, customer service and value.
Bill Lydon, InTech and Automation.com contributing editor and director, North America, for the PLCopen organization, moderated an insightful roundtable discussion on “Automation Industry Expert Insights: CODESYS Tech Talk Fall 2021." It covered industrial automation future trends and challenges with industry leaders and innovators. Roundtable participant Don Bartusiak, president of Collaborative Systems Integration, said, “A challenge for end users is to be bold enough to go after step change improvements in productivity and step change reductions in total cost of ownership of systems by pursuing open architecture system concepts and open process automation ideas.”
Bartusiak is a champion of open automation systems, instrumental in the development of the Open Process Automation System standards. On Automation.com, Lydon also wrote “The Missing ‘Industry 4.0/Digitalization’ Link—Open Programming Standard Conformance & Certification.” The fundamentals of IEC 61131-3 have been adopted by many kinds of automation vendors throughout the world.
IEC 61131-3 is supported by the PLCopen organization that extends the standard with special interest groups, standards, and certifications. These standards and certifications include motion control, safety, OPC UA, XML interchange, and reusability. Due to the task structure of a full IEC 61131 implementation, both event-driven and cyclical approaches can be accomplished. There have been significant enhancements to IEC 61131 by the PLCopen organization, including OPC UA for enterprise communications, remote procedure calls, and controller-to-controller standardized data communication models.
Compliance and conformance are essential
Regardless of the programming standard, according to Lydon, there must be strong vendor compliance and certification of products to effectively ensure program portability and multivendor interoperability. This has been an ongoing issue in the industrial and process automation industry. The lack of vendor full conformance and certification to open programming standards creates tremendous inefficiencies and architectural challenges that lead to isolated “islands” of control. Integrating these islands into an entire plant architecture requires a great deal of application engineering, extra hardware, and more software to build a coordinated plant automation and control system. The added layers of interfaces cause lower reliability, increased production downtime and potentially higher costs.
This piece originally appeared in the February 2022 issue of InTech magazine.