FINAL THOUGHTS

PLC Considerations
When selecting a PLC or similar control engine there are many questions:

How much I/O? What type of I/O? What type of control logic -- simple ON/OFF or is there PID and data analysis? What type of data is monitored and captured? How much signal conditioning will be required? Are recipes (databases) required? Are operator interfaces required? Are there special communication interfaces required? For example, flow meters, scales, thermocouples, or other signals that are not a regular discrete or analog signal. Does the application require links to an external network, database, or some type of MES system? Does the application require motion control, bar coding, machine vision, etc?

PLC and / or Computer

Sometimes we do not use a typical PLC for the control engine. Typically what we do is: 1. If the application is small (less than 50 I/O), no databases (only a few choices), and simplistic HMI then use a PLC and simple HMI. 2. If the application is small, slow (response time greater than 50 milliseconds) and requires computer functionality (machine vision, networking, databases, multiple axis motion control, etc) we prefer to do the entire application in Visual Basic (VB) or C#. 3. If there are large amounts of I/O (over 100) or you need fast, real-time response, then you will probably want both -- the PLC handling your real-time and direct I/O tasks and the computer handling the non-real-time tasks (such as HMI, databases, etc). There are a lot of gray areas in between. Although todays Pentium running Windows 2000 at 3 GHz with 512 KB RAM is very fast in comparison to technology only three years ago, it is still nice, in large systems, to use a PLC to help segment the system functionality. You can write subroutines to segment functionality -- you can also segment using different controllers.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

1. What about soft PLCs? Soft PLCs are where the PLC is actually software that resides on a computer. Although this is way that the industry is headed in the future, as with all new technology, we would recommend that your first test of new technology not be a critical application. Experiment with new technology on a simple application first. We use soft PLCs and other non PLC control engines and many of these solutions have been around for years. One thing to watch out for with Soft PLCs is that they do not modify the operation system. For example, you could go buy a computer with Xeon dual processors and Hyper Threading expecting to have no CPU processing concerns to find out that the soft PLC software has disable 3 out of the 4 processors. 2. What brand of PLC is the best? It depends. If you have a plant full of GE PLCs then it does not make sense to change to AB. If you have a plant full of some manufacturer that is no longer in business then it is time to evaluate PLC manufacturers. If you have small applications that can be linked by computer networks then AutomationDirect PLCs may be fine. If you have large processes (thousands of I/O) requiring integration of drives and redundancy then you may want to consider AB or Siemens. 3. How can you program so many different PLCs? Most good PLC programmers, after learning three different PLC programming languages, can program any PLCs since the basic functions are the same. In fact there is an International PLC programming standard (IEC 61131-3) that is trying to put the exact same programming logic on every PLC.