IEC 61131-3 & Multi platform portability

[xJAyx]

The company I work for provides furnaces and control products for the heat treating industry. Because we provide products worldwide and for many different clients we have to work with a bunch of different PLC platforms. This is a new situation for me, before this job I have never programmed the same application twice so this issue has never come up.
With the majority of PLC comapnnies now supporting the IEC 61131-3 programming standard, how portable are configurations? Can I export my POUs between platforms? I know I will likely have to remap the I/O and possibly rework the memory configuration, but I'm more so looking for reusing major operation blocks.

 

[FrancisL]

They are far from compatible and certainly not portable!
There are some 1131/3 based packages such as ISaGRAF, ControlBuild and Codesys that can compile to more than one manufacturers PLC. I have no direct experience of them, but I suspect, based on earlier experience that they generate the code to lowest common denominator. And further that the support for online changes is diminished by this approach.
A better answer imho is to standarise your design, using 1131/3 concepts. If you have a good design the actual programming becomes simpler.
In fact, shameless plug, that is what ControlDraw is for.
Francis

http://www.controldraw.co.uk

 

[dV8r]

In some cases "Structured Text" is close and can be copied to multiple manufactures with only slight alterations. The other languages are very rarely even close.

 

[controlsdude]

I always thought if you could do an ASCII import/export like AB does with the *.L5K file, then you could have a chance of going from one plc editor to another with ladder.

But a lot of them still are locked in there own world whether or not they say they are IEC compliant.

 

[PNachtwey]

IL and ST are already in text. IL and ST are the most protable of the IEC languages because on can cut and paste the code. LD, FBD and SFC present a problem because they are graphical. I would use XML to describe LD, FBD and SFC. XML could provide a small wrapper for IL and ST too. When possible I would use IL or ST to define the operation of the internal workings of the LD and FBD blocks but I still think XML will be necesarry to describe the visual parts; If anybody objected to the size of the XML file I would use a zipped XML format. XML compresses well.