An Open Source IEC 61131-3 Integrated Development Environment

The IEC 61131-3 standard defines a common framework for programming PLCs (programmable logic controllers), which includes the complete definition of four programming languages and a state machine definition language. Industrial PLC vendors are slowly offering support for this standard, however small inconsistencies remain between their implementations, transferring programs between vendors is almost impossible due to different file formats, and licenses are generally too expensive to allow students do install these commercial solutions on their own computers. To this end, the authors have developed an integrated development environment (IDE) for the IEC 61131-3 framework, which is being offered to the general public under the GNU public license (GPL). The IDE consists of a graphical user interface (GUI) and a backend compiler. Using the GUI the user may develop programs in any of the four programming languages, as well as the state machine definition language. The backend compiler is used to convert these programs into equivalent C++ programs which may later be compiled and executed on various platforms.