Software plays an ever-increasing role in industrial automation. With this,
the associated software costs increase, even to the point that it
becomes the highest part of the total system. And not all costs are
directly visible: the required maintenance over the life cycle, adding
new functionalities, coping with new governmental rules.
To control these costs, one needs higher efficiency during the application
development, while increasing the software quality.
PLCopen, as an organization active in Industrial Control, is creating a higher
efficiency in your application software development and lowering
your life-cycle costs. As such it is based on standard available
tools to which extensions are and will be defined. With results
like Motion Control Library, Safety, XML specification, Reusability
Level and Conformity Level, PLCopen made solid contributions to
the community, extending the hardware independence from the software
code, as well as reusability of the code and coupling to external
software tools.
PLCopen is a vendor- and product-independent worldwide association. Its
mission is to be the leading association resolving topics related
to control programming to support the use of international standards
in this field. For this PLCopen has several technical and promotional
committees. The committees working within PLCopen are listed on
the left side.
As association, PLCopen is depending on its income through its membership
fees. For this, it supports a multi-level membership, ranging from
suppliers to educational institutes. PLCopen strongly supports the
user community. For this it created additional membership categories.
PLCopen was founded in 1992 and is headquartered in The Netherlands.
One of the core activities of PLCopen is focused around IEC 61131-3,
the only global standard for industrial control programming. It
harmonizes the way people design and operate industrial controls
by standardizing the programming interface. A standard programming
interface allows people with different backgrounds and skills to
create different elements of a program during different stages of
the software lifecycle: specification, design, implementation, testing,
installation and maintenance. Yet all pieces adhere to a common
structure and work together harmoniously. The standard includes
the definition of the Sequential Function Chart (SFC) language,
used to structure the internal organization of a program, and four
inter-operable programming languages: Instruction List (IL), Ladder
Diagram (LD), Function Block Diagram (FBD) and Structured Text (ST).
Via decomposition into logical elements, modularization and modern
software techniques, each program is structured, increasing its
re-usability, reducing errors and increasing programming and user
efficiency.
PLCopen was founded in 1992 and has headquarters in The Netherlands with
supporting offices in the USA, Japan, and China. For the organization chart,
click here.
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