Analysis of IEC 61131-3 Compliance through PLCope XML interface

Industrial process measurement and control systems are used in most of the industrial sectors to achieve production improvement, process optimization and time and cost reduction. Integration, reuse, flexibility and optimization are demanded to adapt to a rapidly changing and competitive market. In fact, standardization is a key goal to achieve these goals. The international standardization efforts have lead to the definition to the IEC 61131 standard. Part 3 of this standard defines a software model for defining automation projects as well as 5 programming languages. Nowadays most of the programmable logic controllers vendors follow this standard at different levels, although each programming tool adds vendor specific particularities. In order to achieve tool interoperability and thus, reusability of code, the international organization PLCopen has defined an open XML interface. This paper presents an approach that analyzes at what extent an automation project developed within a programming environment and exported using the PLCopen XML interface, is IEC 61131-3 compliant. The conformity analysis is performed at different levels: data types, programming languages and software architecture, and different grades of compliance are defined for each conformity level.