PLCopen

Two of our Scientific Staff members of the Institute of Automation and Information Systems are active in two different working groups of PLCopen. PLCopen is the leading vendor and product independent worldwide association for topics related to industrial control programming. They provide possibilities for faster application development, faster commissioning time and reduced life cycle costs.

Working Group On Guidelines for Usage of Object Orientation

With Object Orientation one can make many additional choices in the way the program is structured and decomposed. To support the right choices and to add to the training programs, PLCopen started an OOP Guidelines initiative. 

Working Group on Benchmarking

This PLCopen benchmarking workgroup has a hardware resource-oriented approach. With this new initiative, the benchmark can indicate the effective performance of the different processors and architectures, and thus help in the selection of the optimal architecture for the control supplier in a very early stage.

Working Group on PLC Software Quality

High control software quality that can optimally meet the challenges of complex, long-living, and evolving machines and plants has since long been one of the key enablers on the road to Industry 4.0. Software metrics are a proven means in computer science to objectively assess software quality. Recently, numerous approaches have emerged in research to transfer established metrics for PLC software in automated manufacturing systems, which are partly also implemented by PLC platform suppliers to enable an automated quality assessment. However, up to now, these approaches have barely made their way into industrial development practice in machine and plant manufacturing.

Therefore, this working group aims to develop guidelines on how a metric-based quality assessment of PLC software can be integrated into the daily industrial routine for different stakeholders in the software engineering workflow in machine and plant engineering. Existing approaches from research and tool support from platform suppliers will be used and enlarged to be applicable for various use cases and company-specific boundary conditions – with little effort in daily practice and at the same time greatest possible benefit.