Prototyping of control units for systems with industrial controllers

Abstract

Reducing the design time of the system control unit remains an urgent task for the developers of these systems. The problem of designing control units based on program-mable logic controllers (PLCs) is their high cost and, as a rule, unavailability at the initial design stage. The aim of the research is to reduce the time and cost of designing the sys-tem by creating prototypes of control units with the software implementation of the con-trol algorithms of the languages of the IEC 61131-3 standard and the execution of pro-grams in the Arduino board. The research method consists in the decomposition of pro-ject models of operating and control automata of the control device and their implemen-tation in the OpenPLC application environment in the form of program organization components (POU) in Ladder Diagram, Function Block Diagram and Sequential Function Chart languages. The result of the study is a method of creating typical POU operating and control automata of the control system, which are executed in the Arduino board. An example of the application of the proposed methodology for the design of a prototype of the object's temperature control system, which can be useful for teaching PLC program-ming, is given. The developed prototype was tested using a logical PLC and a physical prototype, which confirmed their functional compliance with the original and a reduction in the cost of the equipment by at least an order of magnitude.