Graphical Modeling of PLC-based Industrial Control Applications

Industrial process measurement and control systems (IPMCS) 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 integration in this type of applications. The international standardization efforts have lead to the definition of the IEC 1131 standard. Part 3 of this standard defines a software model for defining automation projects as well as 5 programming languages, emphasizing software reuse. The Technical Committee 6 for XML belonging to the international organization PLCopen, has defined an XML based interface for importing/exporting automation projects. This work presents a graphical modeling tool that guides the user through the definition of the IEC1131-3 automation project, as a PLC programming tool does. But, internally, it stores the information about the automation project as a XML file. From it, it is possible to extract information, export the automation project to different programming tools or to translate it to PLCopen XML format, using different XML technologies.