The practice of industrial logic design

Automated synthesis of Ladder automation circuits based on state-diagrams

“…Lucas et al [7] put clearly the real dimensions of the problem in their observational study at Lamb Technicon. According to this study, a typical project corresponds to control logic of about tens of thousands of rungs and approximately one quarter (28%) of the total project time is spent actually generating logic for the controller.…”

“…We are working now to increase the number of system's states to 64. As pointed out by Lucas et al [7] in their observation study of the current methods of creating control logic, a typical real number of an industrial process may be 10,000 rungs. It is difficult to imagine today a software package for control logic generation capable of handling such a number of control rungs.…”

“…State-transition table format is also used in an implementation methodology described by Lauron et al [5], where a control strategy is first derived before the translation into a Ladder logic code. Lucas et al [7] note in their observation study that none of other alternative methodologies (based on Petri nets, finite state machines, etc.) have been implemented in industrial scale logic programming.…”

“…Many researchers have been working on the improvement of industrial logic creation and design. The problem that many are trying to solve is the perceived inefficiency of the current methods, which use primitive, low-level design languages, with practically no logic reuse, and are very timeconsuming [7]. In searching for a solution, researchers have focused on methods that can be automatically generated from a specification.…”

Modular finite state machines: Development and application to reconfigurable manufacturing cell controller generation

“…The logic developer writes the logic controller based on experience without reference to a formal specification or formal model of the environment (Lucas & Tilbury, 2004).…”