A Cost Effective Solution for Development Environment for Data Acquisition, Monitoring and Simulation of PLC Controlled Applications

Abstract

It is very important to test and monitor the operation of Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) in real time (online). Nowadays, conventional, but expensive monitoring systems for PLCs, such as Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems, software and hardware simulators (or debuggers), are widely used. This paper proposes a user friendly and cost-effective development environment for monitoring, data acquisition and online simulation of applications with PLC. The purpose of this solution is to simulate the process which is controlled by the PLC. The performances of the proposed development environment are presented on the examples of washing machine and dishwasher simulators.

Keywords

• Data acquisition
• monitoring
• PLC
• simulation