Development environment for monitoring, data acquisition and simulation of PLC controlled applications

It is very important to monitor and test the operation of Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) in real time (online). There are many conventional, but expensive monitoring systems for PLC, such as Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems, software and hardware simulators (or debuggers), etc. This paper proposes a user friendly and cost-effective development environment for monitoring and data acquisition of applications with PLC. The purpose of this solution is to simulate the process which is controlled by the PLC. The performances of the development environment are presented on the example of washing machine and dishwasher simulators.